Traffic Shaping Mechanism Based on Time Slot-Aware Cyclic Queuing and Forwarding in Time-Sensitive Networking

Time sensitive network is one of the core technologies of future smart factories. There are multiple business flows with different requirements in smart factories. To ensure the performance of critical traffic flows and improve network bandwidth utilization, a Time Slot-Aware Cyclic Queuing and Forwarding (TSA-CQF) mechanism is proposed. TSA-CQF improves bandwidth utilization by inserting low-priority traffic into the remaining available time slots of the CQF queues. TSA-CQF mechanism includes slot-aware insertion of low priority traffic and global traffic planning for low-priority traffic. The first part of TSA-CQF is to insert low priority traffic into the remaining time slots of the CQF queues. The global traffic planning is modeled as a multi-conditional objective optimization problem, and it is solved by the simulated annealing algorithm to accept as many flows as possible to increase the bandwidth utilization. Simulation results show that TSA-CQF improves the bandwidth utilization by 11.29% on average compared with the traditional CQF mechanism under mixed traffic conditions.