Automatic Configuration of a TSN Network for SDC-based Medical Device Networks

Abstract

Today’s operating rooms consist of a multitude of medical devices. Nowadays, the interconnection of these devices is manufacturer-dependent. To overcome this lack of interoperability, the new IEEE 11073 Service-oriented Device Connectivity (SDC) family of standards has been developed. Plenty of use cases take advantages from the interconnection of medical devices among each other, based on SDC. In this paper, we focus on time-critical use-cases, like the activation of a high-frequency surgical device to emit power at the instrument triggered by a networked foot switch. The execution of such remote control operations, are dependent on deterministic data transmission. To fulfill these requirements we propose the usage of the new Time-sensitive Networking (TSN) standards IEEE 802.1. The combination of SDC and TSN enables semantic interoperability and hard real-time communication at the same network, based on standards. We provide a new approach to automatically configure the underlying TSN network by means of the medical devices’ self-description according to the SDC family of standards. Our approach shows that the required information for configuring the TSN network can be extracted from the self-description.