Leveraging Flexibility of Time-Sensitive Networks for dynamic Reconfigurability

In Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN) applications with the highest real-time flow requirements are deployed using the Time-Aware Shaper which requires careful planning and scheduling of flows before deployment. Such deployments lack support for dynamic industrial scenarios such as modular machine assembly and reconfiguration, which require a flexible transition between real-time tasks. In contrast, state-of-the-art techniques rely on flow rescheduling and deployment in conjunction with undesired network downtime. Existing works on adapting schedules to traffic admissions are limited in their ability to choose suitable flows to account for future tasks. In this paper, we aim to leverage the flexibility of scheduler configurations to enable TSN dynamic reconfigurability at runtime. We propose a notion of flexibility for TSN Time-Aware Shaper schedules which we utilize to decide the admissibility of consecutive real-time tasks.