Network Calculus Results for TSN: An Introduction

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of standards that enables the industry to provide real-time guarantees for time-critical communications with Ethernet hardware. TSN supports various queuing and scheduling mechanisms and allows the integration of multiple traffic types in a single network. Network Calculus (NC) can be used to calculate upper bounds for latencies and buffer sizes within these networks, for example, for safety or real-time traffic. We explain the relevance of NC for TSN-based computer communications and potential areas of application. Different NC analysis approaches have been published to examine different parts of TSN and this paper provides a survey of these publications and presents their main results, dependencies, and differences. We present a consistent presentation of the most important results and suggest an improvement to model the output of sending end-devices. To ease access to the current research status, we introduce a common notation to show how all results depend on each other and also identify common assumptions. Thus, we offer a comprehensive overview of NC for industrial networks and identify possible areas for future work.