Time-Aware Traffic Scheduling with Virtual Queues in Time-Sensitive Networking

Time-Sensitive Networking is a promising technology that supports deterministic services with bounded delay, low packet delay variation, and low packet loss. Time-Sensitive Networking consists of several components, in which traffic scheduling plays an important role to provide the delay guarantee. The traffic scheduling on the level of flow is challenging for dense traffic demands. In this paper, we propose a time-aware traffic scheduling scheme based on network virtualization to schedule a large number of flows. In the scheme, the physical queues of a network node are abstracted as virtual queues, which isolate each flow with a time offset parameter. A scheduling algorithm is designed into two stages of virtual queues mapping and schedule computation. The simulation results in a use case of industrial automation show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.