Formation and Assertion of Data Unit Groups in 3GPP Networks with TSN and PDU Set Support

Industrial applications and Extended Reality vertical sectors have expressed the need for dedicated Quality of Service considerations from 3GPP to support time-sensitive, bursty and high throughput communications. Consequently, 3GPP enabled support for Time-Sensitive Networking in Release 17 and started specifying the concept around Packet Data Unit Sets in Release 18. This paper presents a novel solution for any IP-based communication enabling time-sensitive communication while utilising 3GPP Packet Data Unit Set feature. This paper proposes extensions to the IP header that can be utilised by any IP based network. The proposed solutions introduce the concept of a Data Unit Group to describe the entirety of an Application Data Unit and its fragmentation into individual IP packets to be delivered over a packet-switched network. This paper defines Data Unit Group Rules to communicate packet header detection and action rules to Time-Sensitive Networking switches. The rules can be used by Time-Sensitive Networking switches to prioritise and re-order/pre-empt packets and by User Equipments and User Plane Functions to write Packet Data Unit Set Markings.