Simulative Evaluation of the TSN Mechanisms Time-Aware Shaper and Frame Preemption and Their Suitability for Industrial Use Cases

Proprietary field buses such as PROFINET IRT, EtherNet/IP, and EtherCAT are currently used to ensure realtime communication in industrial automation appliances. Despite the fact that they are mostly Ethernet-based, interoperability between them is limited or not feasible at all. In the Industry 4.0 context, the goal is to enable real-time communication with ultralow latencies, while also permitting non-critical traffic and ensuring interoperability between devices from different manufacturers. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a promising candidate to meet these requirements on layer 2 of the OSI reference model in conjunction with a suitable higher-level protocol. The IEEE 802.1 TSN Task Group has been developing extensions to the Ethernet technology to make it more deterministic and reliable since 2012. In this paper, we have evaluated the TSN mechanisms (1) Time-Aware Shaper (TAS) and (2) frame preemption (FP) and compared them to the existing strict priority scheduling (ST) mechanism in exemplary setups. The chosen comparison criteria are latency guarantee, jitter, and the influence on non-critical traffic. Since the support of TSN devices on the market is low, we have carried out the evaluation using the simulation framework OMNeT++ and the NeSTiNg library. Our evaluation shows that, all in all, TAS performs the best, but it introduces a great configuration overhead. FP and ST can keep up in certain scenarios and their performance can even be improved.