Incremental Performance Analysis for Accelerating Verification of TSN Network Reconfigurations

IEEE 802.1 Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) comprises a set of real-time sub-standards that are rapidly becoming the de facto standard in numerous safety-critical domains. Nevertheless, existing TSN standards face challenges when encountering runtime reconfigurations, such as the efficient and safe real-time reconstruction of networks, which has become a current focal point of research. Although certain studies have commenced on dynamic scheduling and routing for TSN networks, a research gap persists in the online schedulability verification of mixed-critical messages. The present real-time performance analysis method is oriented toward assessing the schedulability of entire network flows. Consequently, even minor alterations made during reconfiguration necessitate the re-evaluation of all flows to verify their adherence to deadlines. In the paper, we propose an incremental performance analysis method (iPAM) to mitigate the cost of schedulability re-verification when reconfiguring the network of the TSN/TAS+CBS hybrid architecture. Extensive experiments conducted on a large-scale adapted realistic test case, demonstrate that, in comparison to the state-of-the-art full-performance analysis method, our iPAM substantially reduces evaluation time by approximately 75%-95% for large-scale networks. This advantage becomes increasingly pronounced as the scale of the network expands.