Parth Anand: Routing Optimization for MCQF in TSN

As industrial networks become increasingly complex and real-time IoT applications proliferate, ensuring deterministic communication is crucial. The Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards, developed by the IEEE 802.1 Task Group, address this need by introducing traffic scheduling mechanisms such as the Time-Aware Shaper (TAS) and Multiple Cyclic Queuing and Forwarding (MCQF). However, while much research has focused on traffic scheduling, the impact of routing algorithms on flow schedulability remains underexplored. Improving flow schedulability in this context means reducing bandwidth and deadline violations. This work introduces an enhanced load-balancing routing algorithm specifically designed for TSN networks using MCQF traffic shaping. The proposed algorithm optimizes load distribution and introduces deadline-aware path filtering to improve the schedulability of time-sensitive flows. Additionally, custom flow-sorting techniques are employed to prioritize routing decisions based on flow characteristics such as size, period, and deadline. The integration of this routing algorithm into an existing MCQF codebase demonstrates an increase in the percentage of schedulable flows, resulting in fewer deadline and bandwidth violations compared to the traditional Shortest Path routing method.

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