Search Results

IEEE Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is one of the main solutions considered by the industry to support time-sensitive communication in data-intensive safety-critical and mission-critical applications such as autonomous driving and smart manufacturing. IEEE TSN standardizes several mechanisms to support real-time traffic on Ethernet networks. Time-Aware Shapers (TAS) (IEEE 802.1Qbv) is the standardized mechanisms of TSN that is usually considered to provide the most deterministic behavior for packet forwarding. TAS regulates when traffic classes may forward incoming packets to the egress of a TSN switch using gates that are opened and closed according to a time-triggered schedule. State-of-the-art solutions to configure or analyze TAS do not allow for multiple traffic classes to have their TAS gates opened at the same time according to any arbitrary schedule. In this paper, we present the first response-time analysis for traffic shaped with TAS where no restriction is enforced on the gate schedule. The proposed analysis is exact. It is a non-trivial variant of the schedule abstraction graph analysis framework [Nasri and Brandenburg, 2017]. Experiments confirm the usefulness of the proposed analysis and show that it is promising for doing design-space exploration where non-conventional TAS gates configurations are investigated to, for instance, improve average-case performance without degrading the worst-case.