Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) has emerged as a key technology for ensuring reliable and deterministic communication in vehicular networks. However, the complexity of evaluating, configuring, and analyzing TSN mechanisms has hindered its widespread adoption. This paper introduces CONAN-TSN, an integrated toolchain designed to address these challenges by providing a comprehensive solution for the configuration, analysis, and evaluation of TSN networks. CONAN-TSN includes tools for traffic generation, traffic mapping, scheduling, and timing analysis, enabling seamless integration and practical implementation of TSN in vehicular systems. The toolchain’s effectiveness is demonstrated through its application to an industrial use case, showcasing its ability to enhance network schedulability and performance. The results highlight CONAN-TSN’s potential to bridge the gap between theoretical benefits and real-world deployment of TSN, offering a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners in the field.

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) has become one of the most relevant communication networks in many application areas. Among several traffic classes supported by TSN networks, Audio-Video Bridging (AVB) traffic requires a Worst-Case Response Time Analysis (WCRTA) to ensure that AVB frames meet their time requirements. In this paper, we evaluate the existing WCRTAs that cover various features of TSN, including Scheduled Traffic (ST) interference and preemption. When considering the effect of the ST interference, we detect optimism problems in two of the existing WCRTAs, namely (i) the analysis based on the busy period calculation and (ii) the analysis based on the eligible interval. Therefore, we propose a new analysis including a new ST interference calculation that can extend the analysis based on the eligible interval approach. The new analysis covers the effect of the ST interference, the preemption by the ST traffic, and the multi-hop architecture. The resulting WCRTA, while safe, shows a significant improvement in terms of pessimism level compared to the existing analysis approaches relying on either the concept of busy period or the Network Calculus model.

Novel production paradigms aim at increasing the efficiency and flexibility of production systems. Nonetheless, traditional industrial infrastructures lack the mechanisms needed to support these new paradigms. One of the main limiting factors is the architecture, which follows the automation pyramid in which subsystems are divided in layers depending on their functionalities. This allowed to meet the timing and dependability requirements of the production subsystems, however at the cost of limiting the exchange of information required to provide increased flexibility to the system. For this reason, in this paper we propose a new industrial architecture with a single network infrastructure to connect all the devices that conform to the industrial systems. On top of that, we design an Automatic Network Configurator to support the automatic configuration of the system. To assess the feasibility of our design and evaluate its performance, we implement the first instance of the architecture capable of supporting changes in the traffic requirements during run-time, i.e., without stopping or disrupting the system's operation. Furthermore, we use the implemented instance to measure the time required for reconfigurations.

Offline scheduling of Scheduled Traffic (ST) in Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN) without taking into account the quality of service of non-ST traffic, e.g., time-sensitive traffic such as Audio-Video Bridging (AVB) traffic, can potentially cause deadline misses for non-ST traffic. In this paper, we report our ongoing work to propose a solution that, regardless of the ST scheduling algorithm being used, can ensure meeting timing requirements for non-ST traffic. To do this, we define a frame called Guard Frame (GF) that will be scheduled together with all ST frames. We show that a proper design for the GFs will leave necessary porosity in the ST schedules to ensure that all non-ST traffic will meet their timing requirements.

In this paper, we present our ongoing work on proposing solutions to integrate legacy end-stations into Time-Sensitive Network (TSN) communication systems where the legacy end-stations are synchronized via their legacy clock synchronization protocol. To this end, we experimentally identify the effects of lacking synchronization or partial synchronization in TSN networks. In the experiments we show the effects of clock synchronization in different scenarios on jitter and clock drifts. Based on the experiments, we propose preliminary solutions to overcome the identified effects.

This paper proposes a method to efficiently map the legacy Ethernet-based traffic into Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) traffic classes considering different traffic characteristics. Traffic mapping is one of the essential steps for industries to gradually move towards TSN, which in turn significantly mitigates the management complexity of industrial communication systems. In this paper, we first identify the legacy Ethernet traffic characteristics and properties. Based on the legacy traffic characteristics we presented a mapping methodology to map them into different TSN traffic classes. We implemented the mapping method as a tool, named Legacy Ethernet-based Traffic Mapping Tool or LETRA, together with a TSN traffic scheduling and performed a set of evaluations on different synthetic networks. The results show that the proposed mapping method obtains up to 90% improvement in the schedulability ratio of the traffic compared to an intuitive mapping method on a multi-switch network architecture.

The IEEE Audio Video Bridging (AVB) Task Group (TG) was created to provide Ethernet with soft real-time guarantees. Later on, the TG was renamed to Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and its scope broadened to support hard real-time and critical applications. The Stream Reservation Protocol (SRP) is a key work of the TGs as it allows reserving resources in the network, guaranteeing the required quality of service. AVB's SRP is based on a distributed architecture, whereas TSN's is based on centralized ones. The distributed version of SRP is supported and used in TSN. Nevertheless, it was not designed to provide properties that are important for critical applications. In this article, we model SRP using UPPAAL and we study the termination and consistency. We verify that SRP does not provide such properties. Furthermore, we propose an improved protocol called Consistent Stream Reservation Protocol (CSRP) and we formally verify its correctness using UPPAAL.

Moving towards new technologies, such as Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), in industries should be gradual with a proper integration process instead of replacing the existing ones to make it beneficial in terms of cost and performance. Within this context, this paper identifies the challenges of integrating a legacy EtherCAT network, as a commonly used technology in the automation domain, into a TSN network. We show that clock synchronization plays an essential role when it comes to EtherCAT-TSN network integration with important requirements. We propose a clock synchronization mechanism based on the TSN standards to obtain a precise synchronization among EtherCAT nodes, resulting to an efficient data transmission. Based on a formal verification framework using UPPAAL tool we show that the integrated EtherCAT-TSN network with the proposed clock synchronization mechanism achieves at least 3 times higher synchronization precision compared to not using any synchronization.

Critical Adaptive Distributed Embedded Systems (ADESs) are nowadays the focus of many researchers. ADESs are envisioned to dynamically modify their behavior to support changes of their real-time and dependability requirements at runtime as the conditions of the environment in which they operate vary. To provide ADESs with an adequate communication infrastructure, our research group proposed the Flexible-Time-Triggered Replicated Star (FTTRS). FTTRS provides highly reliable communication services on top of Ethernet, while keeping the adaptivity benefits that the Flexible-Time-Triggered (FTT) communication paradigm offers from a real-time perspective. This paper formally verifies, by means of model checking, the correctness of the mechanisms FTTRS includes to enforce consistent changes of the communication scheduling at runtime.

The Audio Video Bridging Task Group (AVB TG) from the IEEE proposed a series of standards to provide Ethernet with soft real-time guarantees. Later on, the group was renamed to Time-Sensitive Networking and its scope was broadened to provide new services to support critical applications. The Stream Reservation Protocol (SRP) stands out among the projects developed by the groups. Nonetheless, SRP was originally designed for audio/video applications and does not take into account properties that are important for critical systems; such as termination and consistency. In this work we study the termination and consistency of SRP at different levels, using a model we developed of this protocol in Uppaal. We see that SRP does not provide termination nor consistency, we discuss how this can impact critical applications and we propose solutions for all the issues detected.