Precise Timing Based on Software-Defined Time-Sensitive Networking in Smart City

Smart city infrastructure, as entities with multisensory perception and heterogeneous data fusion, presents new temporal challenges. With the increasing reliance on applications such as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) for real-time interaction, high-frequency financial transactions, data centers, digital twins, augmented reality, and the metaverse, there is a critical need for data with accurate timestamps. This paper proposes a precise timing scheme based on Software-Defined Time-Sensitive Networking (SD-TSN), utilizing a paradigm combining SDN and TSN to address unified control and management of data timestamping across diverse smart city scenarios. By employing software timestamping at time-sensitive nodes, sub-millisecond precision is achieved, while hardware timestamping achieves sub-microsecond precision. Leveraging standardized TSN networks economically and effectively fulfills the timing precision requirements for data timing needs in different scenarios.