Results, Insights and Best Practices from IIC Testbeds: Time-Sensitive Networking Testbed
To date, most of the testbed participants have used the TSN Testbed to achieve results to advance their synchronization and scheduled traffic capabilities. Most participants are currently working on communicating critical control traffic and successfully getting certain protocols to run over TSN. The TSN Testbed’ s significant progress is great news for all of the participants. They have used the work in the TSN Testbed to put a high priority on their investments.
All participants are gaining a valuable sense of how their particular implementations work with this new technology; what challenges they have encountered, where they need to focus development and where they may have misunderstood or require further clarification from the standards and technology elements. All participants – the network infrastructure vendors, the end-device vendors, even the testing tool vendors – have learned what it means to implement TSN, where they can enhance, improve or update their product to interoperate and how it can be done in such a way that the vendors and eventually the customers gain value. These experiences are not just valuable for the participants, but are being fed back to the various standards groups working on TSN.
The most recent TSN Testbed plugfest occurred on January 12 & 13, 2017 in Austin, Texas at the NI Industrial IoT Lab.
Three plugfests have occurred, to date, offering participants opportunities to test, for example: � Synchronizing devices to a common, precise sense of time delivered over the network � Establishing TSN flows between various vendors � Defining TSN flows in Central Network Controllers( CNCs) and distribute schedules to network infrastructure � Communicating input / output traffic via TSN flows � Demonstrating TSN’ s ability to protect critical flows from high-bandwidth traffic � Connecting via gateway non-TSN traffic into TSN flows � TSN flow requirements � CNC to network infrastructure( schedule distribution) � Data consistency over OPC UA Pub-Sub over TSN
7. INFLUENCING STANDARDS
It is one thing to build a standard and it is another thing to actually implement and use it. The TSN Testbed is accelerating this process by early phase usage of enhancements to the Ethernet standards.
Specifically, the testbed has been influencing two Ethernet standards: IEEE 802.1 and IEEE 802.3. All TSN Testbed work is filtered to Avnu, a standards organization developing the interoperability and certification based on IEEE’ s TSN. Through Avnu, it is channeled back into IEEE [ Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ].
- 24- January 2017