Dynamic QoS-Aware Traffic Planning for Time-Triggered Flows in the Real-time Data Plane

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel, efficient method for dynamic traffic planning in real-time networks that ensures QoS guarantees during flow reconfiguration, improving network utilization and adaptability.

Contribution

It presents a conflict-graph based model and a heuristic algorithm for dynamic, QoS-aware traffic planning in time-triggered networks, addressing limitations of existing methods.

Findings

Efficient computation of new traffic plans for hundreds of flows.

Maintains QoS guarantees during transition phases.

Improves network utilization in dynamic scenarios.

Abstract

Many networked applications, e.g., in the domain of cyber-physical systems, require strict service guarantees, usually in the form of jitter and latency bounds, for time-triggered traffic flows. It is a notoriously hard problem to compute a network-wide traffic plan that satisfies these requirements, and dynamic changes in the flow set add even more challenges. Existing traffic-planning methods are ill-suited for dynamic scenarios because they either suffer from high computational cost, can result in low network utilization, or provide no explicit guarantees when transitioning to a new traffic plan that incorporates new flows. Therefore, we present a novel approach for dynamic traffic planning of time-triggered flows. Our conflict-graph based modeling of the traffic planning problem allows to reconfigure active flows to increase the network utilization, while also providing per-flow QoS guarantees during the transition to the new traffic plan. Additionally, we introduce a novel heuristic for computing the new traffic plans. Evaluations of our prototypical implementation show that we can efficiently compute new traffic plans in scenarios with hundreds of active flows for a wide range of scenarios.