Simulation and Practice: A Hybrid Experimentation Platform for TSN

Real-time systems rely on deterministic, reliable, and low-latency networks. Ethernet with Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) is used to enhance these systems' robustness while fulfilling their increasing requirements. Instead of introducing a single solution offering low latency, jitter, and packet loss, TSN provides a set of mechanisms that can be selectively combined for each specific use case. Having the means to assess various TSN standards and their configuration is crucial for successful deployments, with hardware (HW) infrastructure and simulators being common approaches. Each method presents challenges, which we aim to tackle with this work by unifying the experiment configuration and its deployment in respective environments. As a base, we use an open-source TSN framework called EnGINE. We extend the framework's functionality and provide a replacement for its HW deployment using the OMNeT++ simulator. A simulated environment is integrated via a translation layer that converts an EnGINE configuration into an OMNeT++ one. We provide design and implementation details and verify the functionality of our approach by running initial experiments and comparing them to previous results by the EnGINE authors. We show that simulation generally achieves lower delay and jitter due to its idealistic nature without typical system artifacts. However, some HW infrastructure and software-dependent configurations may unintentionally impact simulation results. Furthermore, we open-source our contributions enabling an easy way to configure once but evaluate twice while providing additional insights into HW and simulator deployments.