Fixed-Priority Scheduling and Controller Co-Design for Time-Sensitive Networks

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is a set of standardised communication protocols developed under the IEEE 802.1 working group. TSN aims to support deterministic communication based on network schedules that are distributively configured. It is widely considered as the future in-vehicle network solution for highly automated driving, where the requirement on timing guarantee is alongside the demand of high communication bandwidth. In this work, we study a setting of periodic control and non-control packets, with implicit and arbitrary deadlines, respectively. As the FIFO (first-in, first-out) queues in the 802.1Qbv switch incur long delay in the worst case, which prevents the control tasks from achieving short sampling periods and thus impedes control performance optimisation, we propose the first fixed-priority scheduling (FPS) approach for TSN by leveraging its gate control features. In this context, we develop a finer-grained frame-level response time analysis, which provides a tighter bound than the conventional packet-level analysis. Building upon FPS and the above analysis, we formulate a co-design optimisation problem to decide the sampling periods and poles of real-time controllers with settling time as the objective to minimise, whilst satisfying the schedulability constraint.