Fouad Al Khani: Approximation of Time-Sensitive Networking over IEEE 802.11

Cyber-physical systems, distributed robotics, and wireless sensor networks increasingly depend on deterministic communication and accurate time synchronization. In many of these applications, such as coordinated actuation, correctness depends not only on the data being sent but also on when it is processed. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) meets this need on wired Ethernet through shared time, scheduled transmission, and bounded latency. Wireless nodes, however, are becoming part of these systems, and commodity IEEE 802.11 Wi-Fi offers none of these guarantees. Medium contention, retransmissions, and changing signal conditions add unpredictable delay, and general-purpose operating systems such as Linux add timing variability through scheduling and interrupt handling. Wireless TSN remains an active research and standardization topic. This talk examines what TSN-like behavior can look like over best-effort Wi-Fi using software alone on embedded Linux.