Local area network

Engineering

Telecommunications network

Scheduling (production processes)

Quality of service

Network calculus

Set (abstract data type)

Computer science

Distributed computing

Computer network

Ethernet

Mathematics

Notation

Operations management

Programming language

Arithmetic

Queueing theory

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of standards that enables the industry to provide real-time guarantees for time-critical communications with Ethernet hardware. TSN supports various queuing and scheduling mechanisms and allows the integration of multiple traffic types in a single network. Network Calculus (NC) can be used to calculate upper bounds for latencies and buffer sizes within these networks, for example, for safety or real-time traffic. We explain the relevance of NC for TSN-based computer communications and potential areas of application. Different NC analysis approaches have been published to examine different parts of TSN and this paper provides a survey of these publications and presents their main results, dependencies, and differences. We present a consistent presentation of the most important results and suggest an improvement to model the output of sending end-devices. To ease access to the current research status, we introduce a common notation to show how all results depend on each other and also identify common assumptions. Thus, we offer a comprehensive overview of NC for industrial networks and identify possible areas for future work.

Network Calculus Results for TSN: An Introduction