A Framework for TSN-enabled Virtual Environments for Ultra-Low Latency 5G Scenarios

The recent trend of moving cloud computing capabilities to the edge of the network is reshaping the way applications and their middleware supports are designed, deployed, and operated. This new model envisions a continuum of virtual resources between the traditional cloud and the network edge, which is potentially more suitable to meet the heterogeneous Quality of Service (QoS) requirements of the supported application domains. Yet, mission-critical applications such as those in manufacturing, automation, or automotive, still rely on communication standards like the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) protocol and 5G to ensure a deterministic network behavior: in this context, virtualization might introduce unacceptable network perturbations. In this paper, we demonstrate that latency-sensitive applications can execute in virtual machines without disruptions to their network operations. We propose a novel approach to support the TSN protocol in virtual machines through a precise clock synchronization method and we implement it in integration with state-of-the-art and highly-efficient network virtualization techniques. Our experimental results show that it is possible to achieve deterministic and ultra-low latency end-to-end communication in the cloud continuum, for example providing a guaranteed sub-millisecond latency between remote virtual machines.