Mixed-Criticality Flow Scheduling with Low Delay and Limited Bandwidth in TSN
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a promising Ethernet protocol with time determinism, widely used in time-critical systems such as industrial automation, automotive networks, and avionics. By allocating dedicated time windows for time-sensitive flows, TSN enables deterministic transmission; however, as network traffic grows, multiple flows may contend for the same window, causing large delays. Frame aggregation can mitigate this by combining multiple small frames into a larger one, thereby reducing the number of frames and required time windows, but existing approaches typically handle only single-priority traffic and cannot fully utilize pre-allocated time windows. To address this limitation, we propose MCFS-2L, a mixed-criticality flow scheduling scheme with low delay and limited bandwidth usage. MCFS-2L first aggregates critical and non-critical frames with the same source and destination nodes and harmonic periods into a single frame, and then applies a dynamic reassembly and scheduling method that selectively disaggregates non-critical frames from unschedulable aggregated frames. Experimental results show that MCFS-2L increases the acceptance ratio of critical and non-critical flows by up to 4.78% and 8.58%, respectively, while reducing bandwidth utilization by up to 11.88%.