Revision as of 04:09, 23 August 2019

Deploying and Running TSN application in StarlingX Virtual Machine Workload Mode

Introduction

Embedded sectors such as Automotive, Industrial, professional audio/video networking as well as blockchain and high frequency trading have emphasized the need for real-time networks. While Common LAN models are based on Internet Protocols and the IEEE 802 architecture and most of operation is best-effort which is not suitable for use cases (special for edge computing) that require high /known/deterministic availability.

Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of evolving standards developed by IEEE 802.1 Working Group to cover a group of vendor-neutral and IEEE standards with the aim of guaranteeing determinism in delivering time-sensitive traffic with low and bounded latency within an infinitesimal packet loss over the network, while allowing non time-sensitive traffic to be carried through the same network. It is also a key technology that targets for above edge computing segments.

StarlingX (STX) is a complete cloud infrastructure software stack for the edge and it provides running workloads on both virtual machine and container environment.

This Wiki introduces how to deploy and run TSN application in STX virtual machine workload, sample TSN reference applications are taken from [1] with focus on 2 key use cases:

1) IEEE 802.1Qav or Credit Based Shaper (CBS) Ensure bounded transmission latency for time sensitive, loss-sensitive real-time data stream in some critical user scenarios. For instance, when time sensitive traffic and best effort traffic are transmitted together, users require the bandwidth and latency of time-sensitive traffic is protected in the midst of overloaded traffic on the same network, i.e. ensure time-sensitive traffic to have constant transmission rate and latency.

2) IEEE 802.1Qbv or Time Aware Shaper (TAS) Create a protected transmission window for scheduled traffic, which requires low and bounded transmission latency. Scheduled traffic is the term used in IEEE 802.1Qbv to refer to periodic traffic such as industrial automation control frames. This type of traffic is short in frame length and requires immediate transmission when its schedule starts.

Requirements

The TSN reference application had been verified on the following environments:

Demo Environment Setup

The following diagram shows the setup for the demo:

Walk through to deploying TSN applications on STX

Demos