Robust, reliable, and deterministic networks are essential for a variety of applications. In order to provide guaranteed communication network services, Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) unites a set of standards for time-synchronization, flow control, enhanced reliability, and management. We design the TSN-FlexTest testbed with generic commodity hardware and open-source software components to enable flexible TSN measurements. We have conducted extensive measurements to validate the TSN-FlexTest testbed and to examine TSN characteristics. The measurements provide insights into the effects of TSN configurations, such as increasing the number of synchronization messages for the Precision Time Protocol, indicating that a measurement accuracy of 15 ns can be achieved. The TSN measurements included extensive evaluations of the Time-aware Shaper (TAS) for sets of Tactile Internet (TI) packet traffic streams. The measurements elucidate the effects of different scheduling and shaping approaches, while revealing the need for pervasive network control that synchronizes the sending nodes with the network switches. We present the first measurements of distributed TAS with synchronized senders on a commodity hardware testbed, demonstrating the same Quality-of-Service as with dedicated wires for high-priority TI streams despite a 200% over-saturation cross traffic load. The testbed is provided as an open-source project to facilitate future TSN research.

翻译：稳健、可靠且确定性网络对于各类应用至关重要。为提供有保证的通信网络服务，时间敏感网络（TSN）整合了一套涵盖时间同步、流量控制、增强可靠性及管理方面的标准。我们采用通用商用硬件和开源软件组件设计了TSN-FlexTest测试平台，以实现灵活TSN测量。通过开展大量测量实验，我们验证了TSN-FlexTest平台的有效性，并深入研究了TSN特性。测量结果揭示了TSN配置的影响规律——例如增加精确时间协议的同步消息数量可使测量精度达到15纳秒级。TSN测量包含对触觉互联网（TI）数据包流集合的时间感知整形器（TAS）的全面评估。这些测量阐明了不同调度与整形机制的效果，同时揭示了实现发送节点与网络交换机协同的全网控制的必要性。我们首次在商用硬件测试平台上展示了分布式TAS与同步发送端的联合测量结果，结果表明：即使在200%过饱和交叉流量负载下，高优先级TI流仍能获得与专用线缆相同的服务质量。该测试平台以开源项目形式发布，旨在促进未来TSN研究。