A Microservices-Based Control Plane for Time-Sensitive Networking

Abstract

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) aims to provide deterministic communications over Ethernet. The main characteristics of TSN are bounded latency and very high reliability, thus complying with the strict requirements of industrial communications or automotive applications, to name a couple of examples. In order to achieve this goal, TSN defines several scheduling algorithms, among them the Time-Aware Shaper (TAS), which is based on time slots and Gate Control Lists (GCLs). The configuration of network elements to allocate time slots, paths, and GCLs is laborious, and has to be updated promptly and in a dynamic way, as new data flows arrive or disappear. The IEEE 802.1Qcc standard provides the basis to design a TSN control plane to face these challenges, following the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) paradigm. However, most of the current SDN/TSN control plane solutions are monolithic applications designed to run on dedicated servers, and do not provide the required flexibility to escalate when facing increasing service requests. This work presents μTSN-CP, an SDN/TSN microservices-based control plane, based on the 802.1Qcc standard. Our architecture leverages the advantages of microservices, enabling the control plane to scale up or down in response to varying workloads dynamically. We achieve enhanced flexibility and resilience by breaking down the control plane into smaller, independent microservices. The performance of μTSN-CP is evaluated in a real environment with TSN switches, and various integer linear problem solvers, running over different computing platforms.