A Time Utility Function Driven Scheduling Scheme for Managing Mixed-Criticality Traffic in TSN

With the development of the industrial Internet, IEEE Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) has attracted more and more attentions due to its capability of providing deterministic network performance. Unlike most existing studies that only considered a single type of traffic, our work addresses the scheduling problem of mixed-criticality traffic in TSN. Time utility function (TUF) is a utility curve that measures the quality of service (QoS) of streams with respect to end-to-end delays. In this paper, we introduce a variety of TUFs for different streams in TSN according to specific timing requirements. To match the transmission protocol of TSN, we first categorize mixed-criticality traffic into periodic and aperiodic streams, and then design a novel scheduling scheme aiming to maximize the total TUF value of all streams. We compare our proposed scheme with two benchmark schemes, and evaluation results show that our proposed one outperforms the counterparts, especially under the worst-case network settings.