TSN Gatekeeper: Enforcing stream reservations via P4-based in-network filtering

Real-time communication is crucial for mission critical scenarios, such as industrial automation and automotive applications. To meet these applications' strict quality of service (QoS) requirements, a new set of specifications, known as time-sensitive networking standards (TSN), has been proposed. TSN requires pre-registration of data streams before actual communication to help guarantee bandwidth and ensure constrained end-to-end latency. However, this mechanism is vulnerable to traffic overload and denial of service (DoS) attacks. This paper proposes a P4-based dynamic attack filtering as a link-layer network function to defend TSN against malicious network elements, such as faulty talkers or switches, directly on the data plane. Our experiments indicate that our P4-based implementation can filter malicious traffic with minimal overhead and minimize frame losses for legitimate traffic.