Traffic Steering in Edge Compute Devices using eXpress Data Path for 5G and TSN Integration

摘要

Timeliness has become critical across industrial automation, AR/VR, robotics, and many other use cases. IEEE Time-sensitive networking (TSN) standards provide high-reliability & determinism across wired (Ethernet) networks. Time-critical hard/soft real-time applications typically run over these wired TSN links. However, TSN over-wired links lack the mobility and potential to meet all the needs of Industry 4.0. New generation wireless technologies such as Wi-Fi and 5G that are now introducing TSN supporting capabilities can fulfill this need. The 5G Release 16 from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) supports Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC), which brings the possibility of combining 5G with TSN to meet the stringent requirements of industry 4.0. 5G that comes with the support of both private and public networks is coupled with TSN to support the use cases with deterministic performance and required latency levels. The 5G-TSN networks must provide a low end-to-end (E2E) latency to support time-sensitive applications. The traffic steering delay within the User Equipment (UE) in edge compute devices is a critical component in addition to network latencies. This paper discusses the traffic steering aspects of UE and proposes a new use case of eXpress Data Path (XDP) programming over the 5G modem of UE to efficiently steer the traffic in 5G-TSN networks. Experiment results show that the proposed solution provides 100 times lower latency in traffic steering latency compared to a conventional Layer 2 (L2) software bridge.