Fault- Tolerant Cyclic Queuing and Forwarding in Time-Sensitive Networking

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) provides determin-istic time-sensitive transmission services for critical data at the link layer. Cyclic Queuing and Forwarding (CQF) defined by IEEE 802.1Qch is used for critical data transmission. However, unexpected data errors may occur due to transient faults like electromagnetic interference. At present, the solution to such faults defined in the IEEE TSN standards is to transmit multiple data copies on redundant paths, which introduces network resources wastage. Compared to redundant transmission, retransmission can reduce resource waste, but may violate the deterministic transmission guarantee in TSN. To tackle with this issue, we propose a time-redundant fault-tolerant mechanism for CQF, called fault-tolerant CQF (FT-CQF). On the basis of standard CQF, FT-CQF occupies an additional queue to cache copies of Time- Trigger (TT) flows and reserves time slots to forward them. According to the returned CRC-related messages, FT-CQF will decide whether to forward these copies. Non- Ttflows can also be transmitted during this time when copies are not required to be forwarded. We implement FT-CQF in OMNeT++, and verify the performance of FT-CQF in typical network scenarios. The extensive simulation experiments show that FT-CQF is effective in terms of fault-tolerant effects, consumed resources, delay, and jitter.