Stability-aware integrated routing and scheduling for control applications in Ethernet networks

Real-time communication over Ethernet is becoming important in various application areas of cyber-physical systems such as industrial automation and control, avionics, and automotive networking. Since such applications are typically time critical, Ethernet technology has been enhanced to support time-driven communication through the IEEE 802.1 TSN standards. The performance and stability of control applications is strongly impacted by the timing of the network communication. Thus, in order to guarantee stability requirements, when synthesizing the communication schedule and routing, it is needed to consider the degree to which control applications can tolerate message delays and jitters. In this paper we jointly solve the message scheduling and routing problem for networked cyber-physical systems based on the time-triggered Ethernet TSN standards. Moreover, we consider this communication synthesis problem in the context of control applications and guarantee their worst-case stability, taking explicitly into consideration the impact of communication delay and jitter on control quality. Considering the inherent complexity of the network communication synthesis problem, we also propose new heuristics to improve synthesis efficiency without any major loss of quality. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solutions.