Mitigating Project Risk and Achieving Greater Velocity with TSN Implementation – An Industry Collaboration

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of standards enabling deterministic real-time communication over Ethernet networks. This technology ensures that critical data is transmitted with low latency, minimal jitter, and high reliability, making it suitable for applications that require precise timing, such as industrial automation, automotive, avionics, weapons systems, and more.

TSN achieves deterministic behavior by employing mechanisms such as time synchronization, traffic shaping, and scheduling. These mechanisms enable different types of traffic to share the network efficiently while guaranteeing the timely delivery of critical data packets.

The aim of TSN use is to standardize and enhance Ethernet networks to meet the stringent requirements of real-time applications, providing a foundation for the convergence of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems. Proper TSN support has thus become table stakes for any high-performance real-time operating system (RTOS) and a key design area for real-time systems developers.

A Moving Target

Since the problem was first tackled in the early 2010s by the IEEE 802.1 Working Group and the subsequent foundation of a task group to develop TSN standards, we have witnessed a highly dynamic evolution of these standards, and it continues today. Organizations within specific industry verticals have formed additional projects to define special TSN profiles applicable to their respective markets. Conformance to one or more profiles helps ensure interoperability with vendors in the specific market. These profiles, however, are also evolving.

So how do development teams keep pace with the ongoing change? Perhaps more important: Is the moving target of relevant TSN standards hindering the adoption of this increasingly vital networking technology?

Back to Basics: A Collaboration with Major Industry Players

Wind River®, as an industry leader in the high-performance RTOS space and in TSN support,  has sought to help embedded systems developers navigate a path forward. Our previous blog, “The Edge of Real-Time Connectivity: Wind River’s Commitment to TSN Leadership,” outlines how we are doing this with our RTOS and hypervisor products.

Now we have gone further. We have collaborated with major industry players Lockheed Martin and Parry Labs in aerospace and defense, TTTech Auto and Aptiv in automotive, and leading silicon vendors Intel and Texas Instruments. Collectively, we have produced a new industry positioning paper that will serve as a guide for developers, helping them mitigate project risk and achieve greater velocity in TSN implementations.

Hitting the Moving Target with Time-Sensitive Networking

This industry paper offers an objective, collective viewpoint covering:

• The role of TSN in realizing important aspects of intelligent edge systems
• A concise recap of the TSN sub-protocol categories: clock synchronization, data scheduling and traffic shaping, reliability, and resource management
• A review of the TSN profiles for aerospace onboard Ethernet communications, automotive in-vehicle Ethernet communications, and industrial automation  
• Recommendations for a back-to-basics approach, considering three key factors that help mitigate risk plus a proposed baseline set of standards

As part of the Wind River commitment to TSN industry leadership, we will continue to collaborate with other industry leaders, both as a voice within the industry and in our continued product evolution. We invite you to learn more by downloading this paper. 

About the author

Alan Stranaghan is a Senior Product Marketing Manager at Wind River