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Projecte llegit

Títol: Development of an SDN control plane for Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) endpoints

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: RINCÓN RIVERA, DAVID

Departament: ENTEL

Títol: Development of an SDN control plane for Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) endpoints

Data inici oferta: 26-04-2020     Data finalització oferta: 26-12-2020


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    DG ENG AERO/SIS TEL
    DG ENG AERO/TELEMÀT
    DG ENG SISTE/TELEMÀT
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Segon director/a (UPC): AGUSTÍ TORRA, ANNA
 
Paraules clau:
TSN, AVB, sincronia, Real-time Ethernet
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
Time Sensitive Networking is the name given to a set of protocols that keep real-time constraints on packet-switched networks (that in principle are not able to do that). Economically and technically it makes sense to replace old, many times proprietary, rigid synchronous bus standards with faster, more flexible, standard, cheap Ethernet-based solutions.

Among the industries that will benefit from this technology, aeronautics (communication buses, entertainment systems), audiovisual (replacing of current digital circuits for video in TV studios), automobiles (internal buses, video flows from teh cameras, connected car, autonomous car communications), drones (buses and video transmission), and factories (real-time buses inside the factories)

Several standards have been developed in the few years in this area. To name a few:

- https://standards.ieee.org/events/automotive/08_Teener_TSN.pdf
- https://lkml.org/lkml/2016/6/11/213
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audio_Video_Bridging
- https://github.com/machinekit/machinekit/issues/971
- https://www.tttech.com/news-events/newsroom/details/deterministic-ethernet-forum-a-success/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Sensitive_Networking

In previous theses we have been experimenting with TSN equipment and the design and proof of concept of a SDN-based management architecture for TSN:

https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2117/121567
https://upcommons.upc.edu/handle/2117/119626

The tasks of this project will be to develop further the TSN-SDN architecture by building a software prototype following the aforementioned Bachelor Theses, and specifically:

- Study and document the state of the art in the field
- Search for implementations, and/or implement parts of the standards
- Build a functional testbed where demonstrations can be done
- Experiment with scheduling algorithms
- Additionally, it would be interesting to explore the TSN applications related to avionics and communication buses in airplanes, and cars.

There are several hardware platforms available: PCs, Microtik routers, Raspberry Pis, etc, and specifically these cards from SoC-e (Check the video!): https://soc-e.com/mtsn-kit-a-comprehensive-multiport-tsn-setup/
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
In the industrial and automation world, such as Industry 4.0 or vehicle communication buses, an Ethernet extension that provides timing and quality of service (bandwidth reservations or delay guarantees) has been defined in a series of standards whose aim is to describe how deterministic, time-sensitive and best-effort communications can use the same network. This Ethernet extension is called Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and it has been defined by the TSN Task Group of the IEEE 802.1 committee. The field of the management of the control plane of Local Area Networks (LANs) is evolving towards the Software Defined Networking (SDN) concept, based on a centralized network controller. This controller configures all of the network nodes to satisfy user requirements. The capabilities in SDN controllers come from both open-source and proprietary implementations. Due to this, the SDN controller is a flexible element in terms of network management. Finally, OPC-UA is an architecture that interconnects any kind of industrial or administrative device, with the aim to standardize and automate industrial communications in the application layer. It achieves this goal by only defining the interfaces between elements, its data structure and different communication modes, which allows it to be versatile. The goal of this thesis is to build a prototype part of the TSN endpointmanagement architecture, based on SDN as defined in the IEEE 802.1Qcc standard. This element, the Centralized User Configuration (CUC), will establish a session using OPC-UA with the endpoints that want to take part in a TSN flow, so that they can be properly configured, and it will also communicate with the network controller, so that the TSN flow is established end-to-end (from the talker endpoint to the listener endpoint, passing through the TSN switches). Additionally, this thesis includes the design of the endpoints that will generate and listen to the TSN flow, which will be automatically configured. The results of this thesis include the development of the CUC and the endpoints following the SDN concept. In addition, the interface with the Centralized Network Configuration is prepared for further integrations.

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