Online Rerouting and Rescheduling of Time-Triggered Flows for Fault Tolerance in Time-Sensitive Networking

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is an industry-standard networking protocol that is widely deployed in safety-critical industrial and automotive networks thanks to its quality-of-service (QoS) mechanisms, esp. deterministic transmission and bounded end-to-end delay for time-triggered (TT) flows. In this article, we focus on TT flows and address the issue of fault tolerance against permanent and transient faults with both spatial and temporal redundancy. We present an efficient heuristic algorithm for online incremental rerouting and rescheduling of disrupted flows, assuming the paths and schedules of existing flows stay fixed. It is complementary to and can be combined with offline routing and scheduling algorithms for achieving fault tolerance based on frame replication and elimination for reliability (FRER) (IEEE 802.1CB). Performance evaluation shows that our approach is able to better recover the system’s degree of redundancy (DoR) and has a higher acceptance rate than related work.