End-to-End Reliability in Wireless IEEE 802.1Qbv Time-Sensitive Networks

TL;DR

This paper introduces FIPS, a novel wireless-friendly IEEE 802.1Qbv scheduler that provides formal end-to-end QoS guarantees in wireless TSN, significantly improving reliability and schedulability in industrial cyber-physical systems.

Contribution

FIPS is the first scheduler to offer formal end-to-end reliability guarantees in wireless TSN, addressing limitations of existing schedulers with 5G integration.

Findings

FIPS improves schedulability by up to 45 times for wireless TSN streams.

FIPS isolates QoS violations, preventing cascading failures.

End-to-end reliability drops from 99.99% to below 10% without FIPS.

Abstract

Industrial cyber-physical systems require dependable network communication with formal end-to-end reliability guarantees. Striving towards this goal, recent efforts aim to advance the integration of 5G into Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). However, we show that IEEE 802.1Qbv TSN schedulers that are unattuned to 5G packet delay variations may jeopardize any reliability guarantees provided by the 5G system. We demonstrate this on a case where a 99.99% reliability in the inner 5G network diminishes to below 10% when looking at end-to-end communication in TSN. In this paper, we overcome this shortcoming by introducing Full Interleaving Packet Scheduling (FIPS) as a wireless-friendly IEEE 802.1Qbv scheduler. To the best of our knowledge, FIPS is the first to provide formal end-to-end QoS guarantees in wireless TSN. FIPS allows a controlled batching of TSN streams, which improves schedulability in terms of the number of wireless TSN streams by a factor of up to x45. Even in failure cases, FIPS isolates the otherwise cascading QoS violations to the affected streams and protects all other streams. With formal end-to-end reliability, improved schedulability, and fault isolation, FIPS makes a substantial advance towards dependability in wireless TSN.