Impactless Beacon-Based Wireless TSN Association Procedure

Abstract

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) is widely used in industrial environments to support low-latency deterministic communications. Innovation to bring time-sensitive networking to wireless networks is getting traction. Besides enabling real-time and deterministic communications, Wireless Time-Sensitive Networks (W-TSN) should provide flexibility and easy deployment, key characteristic requirements for industrial networks. Nevertheless, current research in this field focuses on adapting wired TSN features to the wireless world, namely accurate time synchronization and traffic scheduling, essential processes for wireless end devices such as automated and impact-less association procedure are not considered until now. This work proposes a W-TSN impactless association procedure that provides time synchronization and traffic scheduling for prospect W-TSN clients during the association phase by utilization of beacons. As such, prospect clients can perform association procedure in a controlled fashion avoiding collisions with other, already-associated, W-TSN clients. The presented procedure is designed, implemented, and tested in a real-world scenario on top of a wireless Software Defined Radio (SDR) platform with the IEEE802.11 standard. The results show high accuracy synchronization on client frame transmissions even with challenging scheduling timeslots of 128 mu s.