Constant Delay Switching: Asynchronous Traffic Shaping with Jitter Control

Recent developments in the Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) group have put forth a number of mechanisms to improve deterministic latency in layer 2 switches. Their shaping approaches differ with respect to prerequisites, flexibility, maximum latency, and latency variation (jitter). Asynchronous solutions provide flexibility in dynamic scenarios, but Credit-Based Shaping (CBS) and Asynchronous Traffic Shaping (ATS) come with a high latency variance, as the minimum latency is not affected by them. Some applications in industrial and automotive use cases require low jitter while trying to avoid a dependency on time synchronization, and even TSN's redundancy mechanism benefits from a lower latency variance. This work is bridging the gap between low-jitter transmission requirements and asynchronous shaping mechanisms. In this paper, the application of a stateless Asynchronous Constant Delay Shaper (ACDS) is discussed. It collects the queuing duration from the previous bridge to delay each frame for the remaining time such that a constant per-hop delay for each frame is achieved. The discussion includes the prerequisites, the mechanism itself, and its technical complexity, as well as a formal analysis of its guaranteed latency by proving its relation to a token-bucket based ATS. Further, two extensions are discussed, and an evaluation shows the applicability of ACDS by comparing its jitter to ATS in a frame-level simulation.