Scalable Scheduling for Industrial Time-Sensitive Networking: A Hyper-Flow Graph-Based Scheme

Industrial Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) provides deterministic mechanisms for real-time and reliable flow transmission. Increasing attention has been paid to efficient scheduling for time-sensitive flows with stringent requirements such as ultra-low latency and jitter. In TSN, the fine-grained traffic shaping protocol, cyclic queuing and forwarding (CQF), eliminates uncertain delay and frame loss via traffic timing in and out of queues. However, it inevitably causes high scheduling complexity. Moreover, complexity is quite sensitive to flow attributes and network scale. The problem stems in part from the lack of an attribute mining mechanism in existing frame-based scheduling. For time-critical industrial networks with large-scale complex flows, a so-called hyper-flow graph based scheduling scheme is proposed to improve the scheduling scalability in terms of schedulability, scheduling efficiency and latency & jitter. The hyper-flow graph is built by aggregating similar flow sets as hyper-flow nodes and designing a hierarchical scheduling framework. The flow attribute-sensitive scheduling information is embedded into the condensed maximal cliques, and reverse maps them precisely to congestion flow portions for re-scheduling. Its parallel scheduling reduces network scale induced complexity. Further, this scheme is designed in its entirety as a comprehensive scheduling algorithm GH
$^2$
. It improves the three criteria of scalability along a Pareto front. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate its superiority. Notably, GH
$^2$
is verified its scheduling stability with a runtime of less than 100 ms for 1000 flows and near 1/190 of the SOTA FITS method for 3000 flows.