Novel Radio Frame Design for Efficient Integration of Wireless Links into Time-Sensitive Networks

This paper presents a novel radio frame design for wireless links that allows efficient scheduling of multiple time-sensitive flows with bounded delay and arbitrarily small packet jitter requirements. The proposed design is compatible with the IEEE 802.1 standards for Time Sensitive Networks (TSN) and permits the efficient integration of wireless links into newly arrived wired TSN infrastructure. With this aim, we have reformulated the window reservation mechanism introduced in standard 802.1Qbv to deal with the variable transmission rate of wireless links. The new radio frame is organized in a sequence of partially-overlapped windows. If the intended flow does not use its window completely, the unconsumed time can be scheduled to other flows in overlapped windows. The benefits of this approach are evaluated numerically in an illustrative industrial scenario showing substantial gain in terms of both reduced control cycle (flows’ periodicity) and enhanced transmission throughput (number of admitted flows).