Load Balancing for Deterministic Networks

With the advent of 5G and the evolution of Internet protocols, industrial applications are moving from vertical solutions to general purpose IP-based infrastructures that need to meet deterministic Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. The IETF DetNet working group aims at providing an answer to this need with support for (i) deterministic worst-case latency and jitter, and (ii) zero packet loss for time-sensitive traffic. In particular, this working group is currently specifying Cycle Specified Queuing and Forwarding (CSQF), an extension of Cyclic Queuing and Forwarding (CQF) with multiple transmission queues and support for Segment Routing (SR).In this paper, we present a load balancing extension for DetNet that aims at improving network utilization. In order to implement this additional feature, we show how to extend the original SR policy in CSQF. Then, we formulate the optimization problem that a centralized controller has to solve to produce feasible load balancing configurations and we demonstrate on a typical 3-tiers topology that load balancing improves traffic acceptance as the complexity of finding the optimal configurations increases.