Enabling Fog Computing for Industrial Automation Through Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN)

In this article, we advocate for the use of IEEE 802.1 Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) as deterministic transport for the network layer of fog computing in industrial automation. We give an overview of the relevant TSN protocol services and motivate the use of TSN. We propose a configuration agent architecture based on IEEE 802.1Qcc and OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA), capable of performing runtime network configuration. We briefly present the configuration challenges for scheduled networks (considering a subset of TSN mechanisms), and illustrate one problem: the configuration of schedule tables of such networks for hard real-time control applications. We propose a list scheduling-based heuristic to solve this problem. Our evaluation and comparison to previous work demonstrate the feasibility of reconfiguring the scheduled network at runtime for industrial applications within the fog.