Load-balanced Routing Heuristics for Bandwidth Allocation of AVB Flow in TSN

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a new technology developed from Ethernet that guarantees deterministic transmission of various types of flows, such as Time-triggered (TT) flows and Audio-video-bridging (AVB) flows, in the same network. Currently, Time-aware Shaping (TAS) and Credit-based Shaping (CBS) are widely used for scheduling hybrid flows, where the credit value in CBS is directly linked to the logical bandwidth value idleSlope, which affects the real-time performance of AVB flows. However, as the network scale increases, existing bandwidth allocation methods result in higher computation times and lower allocation success rates. In this article, the aforementioned problem is addressed by two-step: first, we design a load-balanced routing heuristic (LBRH) to improve the allocation success rate; second, we accelerate the CBS bandwidth allocation by using unified bandwidth allocation scheme, which integrates LBRH and further improves the allocation success rate. Performance evaluation in multiple test cases shows that LBRH can improve the success rate of bandwidth allocation, and the unified bandwidth allocation scheme integrating LBRH significantly reduces the overall execution time while improving the success rate of bandwidth allocation, which is more suitable for large-scale TSN networks with complex routing.