Joint Resource Allocation to Transparently Integrate 5G TDD Uplink with Time-Aware TSN

TL;DR

This paper presents a joint resource allocation method for integrating 5G TDD uplink with TSN, ensuring deterministic communication and improved resource efficiency in industrial mobility scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a heterogeneous radio resource scheduler that combines static and dynamic scheduling to support time-sensitive TSN flows over 5G uplink.

Findings

Supports diverse TSN flows with deadline-aware scheduling.

Improves resource efficiency by 28% over baseline.

Maintains reliability while increasing throughput for non-deterministic flows.

Abstract

To enable mobility in industrial communication systems, the seamless integration of 5G with Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a promising approach. Deterministic communication across heterogeneous 5G-TSN systems requires joint scheduling between both domains. A key prerequisite for time-aware end-to-end scheduling is determining the forwarding delay for each TSN Traffic Class at every bridge, referred to as Bridge Delay (BD). Hence, to integrate 5G as a transparent TSN bridge, the 5G BD must be determined and guaranteed. Unlike wired bridges, the 5G BD relies on wireless resource management characteristics, such as the Time Division Duplex pattern and radio resource allocation procedure. In particular, traditional Uplink (UL) schedulers are optimized for throughput but often fail to meet the deadline requirements. To address this challenge, we propose a heterogeneous radio resource scheduler that integrates static and dynamic scheduling. The algorithm pre-allocates resources for time-sensitive periodic streams based on the reported BDs, ensuring alignment with the TSN mechanisms Time-Aware Shaper and Per-Stream Filtering and Policing. Meanwhile, remaining resources are dynamically allocated to non-deterministic flows using established strategies such as Proportional Fair, Max C/I, or a Quality of Service-aware priority-based scheduler. The scheduler's performance is evaluated through OMNeT++ simulations. The results demonstrate support for diverse TSN flows while ensuring deadline-aware scheduling of time-sensitive UL traffic in mobility scenarios. Periodic time-sensitive flows are end-to-end scheduled across domains, improving the resource efficiency by 28% compared to the Configured Grant baseline. While reliability is preserved, non-deterministic rate-sensitive flows benefit from the improved resource utilization, resulting in higher throughput