Redundancy Management for Safety-Critical Applications with Time Sensitive Networking

Abstract

In modern cyber physical systems like industrial automation systems and Advance Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), safety is considered as the main concern. Failures in safety-time critical systems may lead to high economic losses as well as dangers for humans and the environment. Therefore, the Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) task group not only introduced real-time properties to Standard Ethernet, but also developed a novel fault-tolerance mechanism called Frame Replication and Elimination for Reliability (FRER). FRER offers highly reliable communication for Time-Triggered (TT) traffic. Simulation tools are seen as a cost and time efficient approach to evaluate and verify network protocols during the development phase and before the actual implementation. As no simulation model in the state-of-the-art implements the time-based features (e.g. time aware shaping and policing) and non-time-based properties (e.g. FRER) of TSN at the same time. Hence, in this paper we present a simulation model for temporal properties and redundancy management in TSN networks using the Riverbed simulation framework. In addition, we introduce the fault injection mechanisms to evaluate the reliability (e.g. violation of end-to-end deadline and packet loss) of TT communication based on FRER and different faults. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework using the realistic network use cases and traffic profiles.