Meta-heuristic-based multipath joint routing and scheduling of time-triggered traffic for time-sensitive networking in IIoT

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) meets the needs of industrial internet of things (IIoT). It solves the challenges of deterministic transmission and reliable communication of time sensitive data streams. Traffic scheduling is the core mechanism of time-sensitive networks. Many excellent researches have explored and optimized the method of scheduling time-triggered streams in TSN. However, the existing time-triggered streams scheduling in TSN mostly separates routing and scheduling, which limits the scalability of scheduling. Many researches are based on fixed routing to schedule streams. Due to the interaction between scheduling and routing, the quality of fixed route solution is inferior to that of joint routing and scheduling. In this paper, we propose a meta-heuristic based multipath joint routing and scheduling method for time-triggered traffic in TSN, named MMRS. We set path selection as a variable and consider multipath routing for fault tolerance. At the same time, we establish the integer linear programming formulation and use meta-heuristic to obtain high-quality solutions. The evaluations show that compared with other excellent routing and scheduling methods, the runtime of 60 streams of MMRS method is reduced by 65.6%, and the schedulability is improved by 21% on average. The experiments verify that our proposed scheduling method can obtain high-quality solutions in an acceptable solution time.