Reconfiguration with Virtual Gate Control List for Deterministic Transmission in Time-Sensitive Networks

Time-aware shaper (TAS) is key to enabling deterministic transmission guarantees in Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN), but requires precise configuration for a specific traffic scenario. Traffic dynamics change scenarios are gradually increasing with the development of Industry 4.0, necessitating reconfiguring TAS to guarantee persistence determinism. However, previous reconfiguration mechanisms are mostly reconfiguring TAS by modifying the gate control lists (GCLs) to adapt to changes in traffic, which may incur a temporary violation of bounds on delays or jitter with undesirable consequences. In this paper, we propose a novel reconfiguration mechanism with the virtual GCL (VGCL) to satisfy new traffic requirements by embedding different VGCLs into the GCL, such that implements TAS reconfiguration while avoiding the GCL modification. Then we develop an incremental VGCL embedding (IVE) algorithm to determine reconfiguration details. Experimental results show that our approach can reconfigure TAS well for dynamic traffic without modifying the GCL while guaranteeing high schedulability in different scenarios.