arXiv subjects

Marc Boyer

Publications and source records attributed to Marc Boyer.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Making Time-Sensitive Networking Deployable: A Comprehensive Lifecycle Architecture

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) provides deterministic guarantees and bounded latency for safety-critical applications across different domains. While the IEEE 802.1 TSN standards provide a comprehensive set of mechanisms for time synchronization, shaping, scheduling, resource reservation, and reliability, deploying TSN in real-world applications remains a complex, multi-step engineering task. Existing research primarily focuses on optimizing individual objectives, such as increasing schedulability, reducing latency, accelerating solution generation, or improving performance analysis. However, whether these extensively researched solutions can be deployed in real-world systems remains unanswered, as the assumptions made in these methodologies often differ from practical hardware constraints. Therefore, a broader, holistic view of end-to-end TSN deployment and management remains an open research question. Currently, there is a lack of a unified perspective, consensus, and coordinated research efforts focusing on a comprehensive end-to-end TSN deployment workflow. We present a comprehensive overview of the TSN deployment lifecycle, current challenges, limitations of existing tools, and future research directions for TSN deployment and management. Lastly, we identify key research gaps from a deployment perspective and provide guidance for the development of next-generation deployable TSN networks.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2022

A Real-time Calculus Approach for Integrating Sporadic Events in Time-triggered Systems

In time-triggered systems, where the schedule table is predefined and statically configured at design time, sporadic event-triggered (ET) tasks are handled within specially dedicated slots or when time-triggered (TT) tasks finish their execution early. We introduce a new paradigm for synthesizing TT schedules that guarantee the correct temporal behavior of TT tasks and the schedulability of sporadic ET tasks with arbitrary deadlines. The approach first expresses a constraint for the TT task schedule in the form of a maximal affine envelope that guarantees that as long as the schedule generation respects this envelope, all sporadic ET tasks meet their deadline. The second step consists of modeling this envelope as a burst limiting constraint and building the TT schedule via simulating a modified Least-Laxity-First (LLF) scheduler. Using this novel technique, we show that we achieve equal or better schedulability and a faster schedule generation for most use-cases compared to simple polling approaches. Moreover, we present an extension to our method that finds the most favourable schedule for TT tasks with respect to ET schedulability, thus increasing the probability of the computed TT schedule remaining feasible when ET tasks are later added or changed.

cs.NI↗

arXiv2020

Latency Analysis of Multiple Classes of AVB Traffic in TSN with Standard Credit Behavior using Network Calculus

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of amendments that extend Ethernet to support distributed safety-critical and real-time applications in the industrial automation, aerospace and automotive areas. TSN integrates multiple traffic types and supports interactions in several combinations. In this paper we consider the configuration supporting Scheduled Traffic (ST) traffic scheduled based on Gate-Control-Lists (GCLs), Audio-Video-Bridging (AVB) traffic according to IEEE 802.1BA that has bounded latencies, and Best-Effort (BE) traffic, for which no guarantees are provided. The paper extends the timing analysis method to multiple AVB classes and proofs the credit bounds for multiple classes of AVB traffic, respectively under frozen and non-frozen behaviors of credit during guard band (GB). They are prerequisites for non-overflow credits of Credit-Based Shaper (CBS) and preventing starvation of AVB traffic. Moreover, this paper proposes an improved timing analysis method reducing the pessimism for the worst-case end-to-end delays of AVB traffic by considering the limitations from the physical link rate and the output of CBS. Finally, we evaluate the improved analysis method on both synthetic and real-world test cases, showing the significant reduction of pessimism on latency bounds compared to related work, and presenting the correctness validation compared with simulation results. We also compare the AVB latency bounds in the case of frozen and non-frozen credit during GB. Additionally, we evaluate the scalability of our method with variation of the load of ST flows and of the bandwidth reservation for AVB traffic.

cs.PF↗

arXiv2020

Interleaved Weighted Round-Robin: A Network Calculus Analysis

Weighted Round-Robin (WRR) is often used, due to its simplicity, for scheduling packets or tasks. With WRR, a number of packets equal to the weight allocated to a flow can be served consecutively, which leads to a bursty service. Interleaved Weighted Round-Robin (IWRR) is a variant that mitigates this effect. We are interested in finding bounds on worst-case delay obtained with IWRR. To this end, we use a network calculus approach and find a strict service curve for IWRR. The result is obtained using the pseudo-inverse of a function. We show that the strict service curve is the best obtainable one, and that delay bounds derived from it are tight (i.e., worst-case) for flows of packets of constant size. Furthermore, the IWRR strict service curve dominates the strict service curve for WRR that was previously published. We provide some numerical examples to illustrate the reduction in worst-case delays caused by IWRR compared to WRR.

cs.NI↗