Towards Cost-Effective Real-Time High-Throughput End Station Design for Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN)

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) technology has been increasingly deployed in mission- and safety-critical industrial applications to achieve high throughput and deterministic communications. To provide stringent timing guarantee, TSN requires that network devices follow a predefined communication schedule for real-time end-to-end packet processing, involving both TSN bridges and end stations. Extensive efforts have been devoted on the TSN bridge design in the literature. Achieving TSN compatibility on the end stations (especially on COTS hardware), however is challenging due to their constrained resources. To fill this gap, this work presents a software-based open-source TSN end station design that i) enables ultra-low latency and nanosecond-level transmission accuracy based on DPDK, and ii) employs a novel multi-core scheduling framework to boost the throughput of real-time TSN traffic. Our proposed solution leverages existing COTS hardware and thus is more generic and cost-effective compared to existing hardware-centric solutions. We validate our design by developing a prototype end station and incorporating it in a real-world TSN testbed. Our extensive experiments demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our design compared with other state-of-the-art solutions.