TALESS: TSN With Legacy End-Stations Synchronization

In order to facilitate the adoption of Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) by the industry, it is necessary to develop tools to integrate legacy systems with TSN. In this article, we propose a solution for the coexistence of different time domains from different legacy systems, each with its corresponding synchronization protocol, in a single TSN network. To this end, we experimentally identified the effects of replacing the communications subsystem of a legacy Ethernet-based network with TSN in terms of synchronization. Based on the results, we propose a solution called TALESS (TSN with Legacy End-Stations Synchronization). TALESS can identify the drift between the TSN communications subsystem and the integrated legacy devices (end-stations) and then modify the TSN schedule to adapt to the different time domains to avoid the effects of the lack of synchronization between them. We validate TALESS through both simulations and experiments on a prototype. We demonstrate that thanks to TALESS, legacy systems can synchronize through TSN and even improve features such as their reception jitter or their integrability with other legacy systems.