Building a 5G-TSN Testbed: Architecture and Challenges

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is one of the best networking technologies currently available for industrial communications, due to its strict Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees. TSN defines several mechanisms, where packet schedulers play the most important role. The Time-Aware Shaper (TAS) is the scheduler best suited for industrial scenarios, since it is able to assign periodic timeslots to specific flows, thus ensuring QoS if routing and scheduling are correctly configured by the Software-Defined Networking (SDN)-based TSN control plane. However, TSN is a wire-based technology that lacks the flexibility and mobility provided by wireless technologies such as 5G. This is why 3GPP, starting from Release 16, has defined an architecture for the integration of (typically private) 5G networks and TSN in industrial scenarios. New elements, called TSN Translators (TTs), are needed between the 5 G and TSN data planes, and an interface, named TSN Application Function (AF), is defined in 5 G to communicate the control planes of both networks. This paper describes the architecture, challenges, and preliminary results obtained from a 5G-TSN network testbed (including TSN equipment and 5G emulators, and an SDN-based control plane).