Cycle-Based Time-Sensitive and Deterministic Networks: Architecture, Challenges, and Open Issues

The emerging time-critical applications, such as industrial automation, smart grids, and telesurgery, pose strong demands for enabling end-to-end time-sensitive and deterministic networks. However, most of the existing research only considers the time-sensitive network in the layer 2 local area, or separately designs the deterministic network in the layer 3 wide area. The feasibility of end-to-end scheduling has been largely ignored. Moreover, the problem of multi-layer deterministic architecture design and cross-domain resource co-scheduling have not been fully considered. Therefore, this article proposes a novel architecture named C-TSDN, in which the cyclic queuing and forwarding mechanism and the cycle-specified queuing and forwarding mechanism are jointly designed to solve the bandwidth, cycle, and queue mismatch problems in end-to-end scheduling. The key functional modules of the proposed C-TSDN are detailed, including SRv6, network slicing, cycle alignment, and global computing. We elaborately exhibit the promising technical challenges, such as traffic analysis with AI. Finally, some potential open issues as future research directions are pointed out.