Integrating Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) with 5G cellular networks facilitates high-bandwidth, low-latency end-to-end communication in networked embedded systems. An integrated TSN-5G network has the potential to support predictable and deterministic end-to-end communication, as well as to significantly enhance scalability, particularly in industrial automation, by providing flexibility, efficiency, and responsiveness. This paper aims to facilitate the end-to-end (E2E) communication over the integrated TSN-5G networks, by addressing two of the main challenges: (1) design and implementation of an effective TSN-5G gateway that not only ensures an effective forwarding mechanism to translate the traffic among both networks, but also maps the TSN traffic to the corresponding 5G quality-of-service profiles to ensure the timing requirements of high-critical traffic, and (2) establishment of clock synchronization across all network components to support the E2E communication in TSN-5G networks. The paper outlines the design and implementation of a robust TSN-5G gateway that bridges TSN and 5G network architectures, ensuring seamless interoperability between them. We utilize a standalone private 5G network within a controlled lab environment to establish the E2E communication for the TSN-5G network, with a particular emphasizes on analyzing latencies and jitter to provide valuable insights for industrial implementation. Moreover, the gateway facilitates a time synchronization approach, to enable time coordination between network components that supports E2E communication on TSN-5G networks considering the hardware limitation. Our findings indicate that achieving latencies below 20 ms is feasible in an integrated TSN-5G network using the proposed configuration of a private 5G setup with a channel bandwidth of 40 MHz.

Wireless Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN) are needed to fulfill the requirements of real-time applications in areas where wired connections are not feasible. Wireless TSN combines the real-time capabilities of TSN with the flexibility of wireless connectivity opening a path for new use cases while providing determinism to time-critical scenarios such as autonomous vehicles. Industrial automation is integrating TSN with various wireless technologies such as WiFi, 4G, and 5G. This paper presents an ongoing work which aim is to experimentally analyze the performance of TSN when integrated with 4G, 5G, and WiFi in real-world scenarios. This will help both the researchers and industries to have a clear view of the network performance regarding the end-to-end latency requirements when designing their applications and use cases.

Many industrial real-time applications in various domains, e.g., automotive, industrial automation, industrial IoT, and industry 4.0, require ultra-low end-to-end network latency, often in the order of 10 milliseconds or less. The IEEE 802.1 time-sensitive networking (TSN) is a set of standards that supports the required low-latency wired communication with ultra-low jitter. The flexibility of such a wired connection can be increased if it is integrated with a mobile wireless network. The fifth generation of cellular networks (5G) is capable of supporting the required levels of network latency with the Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) service. To fully utilize the potential of these two technologies (TSN and 5G) in industrial applications, seamless integration of the TSN wired-based network with the 5G wireless-based network is needed. In this article, we provide a comprehensive and well-structured snapshot of the existing research on TSN-5G integration. In this regard, we present the planning, execution, and analysis results of the systematic review. We also identify the trends, technical characteristics, and potential gaps in the state of the art, thus highlighting future research directions in the integration of TSN and 5G communication technologies. We notice that 73% of the primary studies address the time synchronization in the integration of TSN and 5G technologies, introducing approaches with an accuracy starting from the levels of hundred nanoseconds to one microsecond. Majority of primary studies aim at optimizing communication latency in their approach, which is a key quality attribute in automotive and industrial automation applications today.

The integration of Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN) with 5G cellular networks requires a defined architecture for network configuration and management. Although 3GPP specifications provide necessary means for the TSN-5G integration, the operation of such converged TSN-5G network remains an open challenge for the research community. To address this challenge, this paper presents the ongoing work in developing a centralized architectural model to configure the TSN-5G network, and forward traffic from TSN to 5G and vice-versa. The proposed architectural model uses knowledge of the traffic characteristics to carry out a more accurate mapping of quality of service attributes between TSN and 5G.

Integrating wired Ethernet networks, such as Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN), to 5G cellular network requires a flow management technique to efficiently map TSN traffic to 5G Quality-of-Service (QoS) flows. The 3GPP Release 16 provides a set of predefined QoS characteristics, such as priority level, packet delay budget, and maximum data burst volume, which can be used for the 5G QoS flows. Within this context, mapping TSN traffic flows to 5G QoS flows in an integrated TSN-5G network is of paramount importance as the mapping can significantly impact on the end-to-end QoS in the integrated network. In this paper, we present a novel and efficient mapping algorithm to map different TSN traffic flows to 5G QoS flows. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first QoS-aware mapping algorithm based on the application constraints used to exchange flows between TSN and 5G network domains. We evaluate the proposed mapping algorithm on synthetic scenarios with random sets of constraints on deadline, jitter, bandwidth, and packet loss rate. The evaluation results show that the proposed mapping algorithm can fulfill over 90% of the applications’ constraints.

Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of IEEE standards based on switched Ethernet that aim at meeting high-bandwidth and low-latency requirements in wired communication. TSN implementations typically do not support integration of wireless networks, which limits their applicability to many industrial applications that need both wired and wire-less communication. The development of 5G and its promised Ultra-Reliable and Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) in-tegrated with TSN would offer a promising solution to meet the bandwidth, latency and reliability requirements in these industrial applications. In order to support such an integration, we propose a technique to translate the traffic between TSN and 5G communication technologies. As a proof of concept, we implement the translation technique in a well-known TSN simulator, namely NeSTiNg, that is based on the OMNeT ++ tool. Furthermore, we evaluate the proposed technique using an automotive industrial use case.