A Deterministic Embedded End-System Tightly Coupled With TSN Schedule

Distributed real-time systems (DRTSs) composed of many embedded end-systems have been widely adopted in the industrial fields. Time-sensitive networking (TSN), as a promising communication infrastructure for DRTS, has shown great potential in industry and academia. TSN assumes that an end-system can release critical tasks to process critical packets strictly according to the prescheduled time. Unfortunately, two factors currently damage this assumption: 1) the jitter caused by system architecture during task release, task execution, and packet transmission; and 2) a TSN schedule result may exceed the execution capability of the end-system and cause conflicts. This article proposed deterministic chip (DetChip), a system-on-chip capable of deterministically implementing the TSN schedule result. DetChip supports time-triggered task release, time-predictable task execution and precise network transmission. Based on DetChip, this article first formalizes the execution capability of the end-system as end-system constraints (ECs). Existing TSN scheduling algorithms integrating ECs can solve conflicts by co-scheduling end-systems and the TSN network. Compared with previous works, DetChip only introduces few clock cycles jitter for critical task execution according to the TSN schedule result. The proposed ECs obtain $2\times$ – $8\times$ more conflict-free solutions for advanced scheduling algorithms with a linear increase in time overhead. Compared with the general end-system, DetChip can reduce $6\times$ – $20\times$ processing jitter to achieve better clock synchronization.