End-to-end Optimized Joint Scheduling of Converged Wireless and Wired Time-Sensitive Networks

While the industry is continuously evolving towards more flexible and modular manufacturing environments, simultaneously requirements on the industrial network infrastructure are changing. Network convergence, flexibility in configuration with support of hard real-time end-to-end guarantees are playing a key role. A technology supporting these features is Time-sensitive Networking (TSN). The extension with TSN-over-5G to additionally support mobile use cases brings us one step closer towards a unified and converged wireless and wired network architecture, as needed for future manufacturing environments. At the same time, management and configuration of such large converged networks to guarantee real-time capabilities becomes inherently complex. In this work, we present a joint configuration approach that enables end-to-end scheduling optimization over a bridged network consisting of TSN and logical 5G bridges. We derive suitable network constraints and optimization strategies and apply constraint programming to determine feasible scheduling solutions. By providing numerical results from a simulative study, we show the effectiveness of our proposed end-to-end framework in terms of resource efficiency and support of concurrent users in the network.