Incompatibility-Aware Joint Routing and Partitioned Scheduling Mechanism in Time-Sensitive Networking

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is a promising technology that meets the deterministic communication needs of real-time transmission. Time-triggered (TT) streams are the kind of streams that have a high priority in TSN. As the scale of load and topology in real industrial scenarios keeps growing, the difficulty of scheduling TT streams also increases. Incremental scheduling is a common way to improve scalability, but it can lead to a decrease in schedulability. This paper mainly focuses on how to take both scalability and schedulability into account for TT streams in TSN. We propose the incompatibility degree as a measure of stream interaction and, furthermore, an incompatibility-aware joint routing and partitioned scheduling (IA/JRPS) mechanism. IA/JRPS uses partitioned scheduling technique to improve scalability. Meanwhile, we establish incompatibility-aware multi-path routing as well as stream partitioning and sorting techniques to improve schedulability. The experimental results verify that IA/JRPS significantly improves computational efficiency on the premise of ensuring a high scheduling success rate compared with baseline methods.