Survey, Design and Evaluation of TGT-HC: A Time-Aware Shaper MAC for Wireless TSN

Abstract

Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communication (URLLC) and Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) are essential for enhancing 5G and Wi-Fi 6/7 to support real-time industrial automation. However, our survey shows that existing Medium Access Control (MAC) schemes still face unresolved latency issues. This paper introduces the Transmission Gating Time Hyperchannel (TGT-HC), a novel contention-free Carrier-Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) scheme driven by a per-flow Time-Aware Shaper (TAS) scheduler. Our analytical results, simulations, and prototyping with the Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP) demonstrate that TGT-HC achieves latency performance comparable to a First-Come-First-Served (FCFS) single server for real-time cyclic traffic, even under high frame error rates (FERs). Given its promising performance, we advocate for reconsidering contention-free CSMA as a viable MAC scheme in next-generation URLLC/TSN.