Towards SDN-based Dynamic Path Reconfiguration for Time Sensitive Networking
Nurefşan Sertbaş Bülbül, Doğanalp Ergenç, Mathias Fischer
Abstract
Future networks will need to support a large number of low-latency flows. In time-sensitive networks (TSN), paths for data flows are usually established at startup time of an application and remain untouched until the flow ends. There is no way to migrate existing flows easily to alternative paths without inducing significant additional delay or wasting resources. Therefore, the resource-utilization of TSN might degrade over time leading to a sub-optimal flow assignment. In this paper we address this problem by combining Software-defined Networking (SDN) that provides better control on network flows with TSN to be able to seamlessly migrate time-sensitive flows. We propose a SDN-based dynamic path reconfiguration algorithm for accommodating TSN flows and formulate it as optimization problem. By exploiting the control plane’s global view, we evaluate different dynamic path configuration strategies under deterministic communication requirements. Our simulation results indicate that reconfiguring the flow assignments from time to time can improve the latency of time-sensitive flows and can increase the number of flows embedded in the network in worst-case scenarios.