Wireless-Aware TSN Engineering: Implications for 5G and Upcoming 6G Networks

The importance of time- and mission-critical applications is increasing as industries and society are advancing in their digitalization. As such applications introduce stringent quality of service (QoS) requirements on the underlying network infrastructure, open standards like time-sensitive networking (TSN) and DetNet are being developed to provide dependable and time-sensitive communication in bridged LAN networks and IP networks, respectively. More recently, the extension to support wireless time-sensitive connectivity has received special interest due to improved network deployment flexibility with mobile devices. These efforts have led to the standardized support of TSN/DetNet in 5G, allowing the 5G system and its mobile devices to be integrated transparently into TSN/DetNet networks while conforming to their user and control plane protocols. Nevertheless, the induced packet delays– and in particular the packet delay variations (PDVs)– of 5G are significantly larger than in their wired counterparts. In this work, we illustrate that established methods to configure TSN/DetNet networks insufficiently address major runtime uncertainties, and that they would consequently result in QoS impairments or scalability issues. We therefore advocate for two systematic approaches to improve traffic shaping in this setting: first, we propose Packet Delay Correction where the PDV is corrected within the 5G system. Second, we introduce “wireless-aware” TSN scheduling to account for the packet delay characteristics of 5G. We demonstrate that wireless-aware TSN scheduling and Packet Delay Correction are complementary in their design and can be combined to provide formal end-to-end reliability guarantees at scale. In addition, being a key aspect to support wireless-aware TSN scheduling in 5G and future 6G networks, we introduce a data-driven framework to predict the packet delay characteristics of the wireless systems over a finite time horizon. Finally, we identify open research questions in wireless-aware TSN engineering and call for action on future studies and standardizations.