QoS-Aware Mapping and Scheduling for Virtual Network Functions in Industrial 5G-TSN Network
Yajing Zhang, Qimin Xu, Mingyan Li, Cailian Chen, Xinping Guan
Abstract
Driven by the advantages of the ubiquitous connection of 5G and the determinacy of Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), the integration of 5G and TSN is expected to provide flexible and deterministic communications for the industry. However, due to the diverse quality of service (QoS) demands of industrial applications, it is challenging to provide suitable QoS mapping across industrial 5G-TSN networks and offer dynamic services via heterogeneous infrastructures. To address this issue, we design a QoS-aware dynamic data injection scheme to realize the interconnection between 5G and TSN under edge-assisted 5G-TSN architecture. To break the tight coupling between applications and infrastructures, we focus on the virtual network function (VNF) mapping problems to facilitate the QoS provisioning for different applications leveraging the network function virtualization (NFV) technique. We first formulate it as a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) with time-sensitive constraints. Then we develop PVMS, a preemption-based two-stage heuristic algorithm for VNF mapping and scheduling in the 5G-TSN network. In particular, we dynamically map the VNFs of arrived applications by greedily searching the earliest available 5G-TSN resources. To further meet the low-latency requirements, we employ a preemption mechanism to provide no-wait transmission for higher priority applications at the cost of the preempted applications being postponed. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed PVMS has better performance in terms of the acceptance ratio, average delay, and QoS guarantee.