EFCC: Ethernet Frame Crafter & Capture for TSN Research

Time-Sensitive Network (TSN) has been considered one of the most viable solutions to meet the increasing demands for ultra-low latency in the 5G and post-5G eras. Due to the importance of timing constraints, network measurement tools are necessary for TSN research and operations to evaluate the performance limits of proofs-of-concept, troubleshoot failures, etc. However, current measurement solutions struggle to achieve important aspects of TSN networks, such as precise control of the transmission frame intervals and burst sizes. Additionally, they cannot generate a mix of multiple flows of various characteristics. In this paper, we present Ethernet Frame Crafter & Capture (EFCC), an FPGA-based network measurement tool to address the aforementioned issues. The proposed system allows the frame generation/capture functions to be configured independently for each port at a line rate of 1GbE. Furthermore, EFCC is open-source and can be ported to most commodity FPGA boards available in the market. The evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed frame generator allows the mixing of multiple flows of various characteristics and that the frame capture module can record the transmit and receive timestamps of frames with a precision of 8-ns/6.4-ns.