Adaptive Group Routing and Scheduling in Multicast Time-Sensitive Networks

Traditionally, industrial networks rely on field bus to support real-time applications. In the trend of industrial internet of things (IIoT), traffic load has increased dramatically, and industrial networks are moving towards time-sensitive networking (TSN), which is based on the widely used Ethernet. In TSN, the time-triggered mechanism is a promising technology for real-time control due to its ability to provide deterministic latency and jitter guarantees. However, this mechanism is mainly based on offline computed schedules, making it difficult to satisfy dynamic requirements in data transmission of IIoT. In this paper, we propose an adaptive group routing and scheduling (AGRS) approach in multicast time-sensitive networks. The framework of this approach contains three phases including pre-processing, schedule synthesis, and post-processing phases. While the pre-processing phase first prunes unnecessary links and adaptively groups qualified complete subgraphs of the network to obtain a simplified topology, the schedule synthesis phase then jointly considers routing and scheduling processes based on the simplified topology to improve schedulability. Finally, the post-processing phase handles the scheduling results of previous phases to generate a feasible schedule. Experiments show that our approach improves schedulability by 68% and reduces execution time by 74% for multicast time-sensitive networks compared with existing approaches.