Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) has been recognized as one of the key enabling technologies for Industry 4.0 and has been deployed in many mission- and safety-critical applications e.g., automotive and aerospace systems. Given the stringent real-time requirements of these applications, the Time-Aware Shaper (TAS) draws special attention among TSN's many traffic shapers due to its ability to achieve deterministic timing guarantees. Several scheduling methods for TAS shapers have been recently developed that claim to improve system schedulability. However, these scheduling methods have yet to be thoroughly evaluated, especially through experimental comparisons, to provide a systematical understanding on their performance using different evaluation metrics in diverse application scenarios. In this paper, we fill this gap by presenting a systematic review and experimental study on existing TAS-based scheduling methods for TSN. We first categorize the system models employed in these works along with the specific problems they aim to solve, and outline the fundamental considerations in the designs of TAS-based scheduling methods. We then perform an extensive evaluation on seventeen representative solutions using both high-fidelity simulations and a real-life TSN testbed, and compare their performance under both synthetic scenarios and real-life industrial use cases. Through these experimental studies, we identify the limitations of individual scheduling methods and highlight several important findings. We expect this work will provide foundational knowledge and performance benchmarks needed for future studies on real-time TSN scheduling, and thus have a significant impact to the community.

翻译：时间敏感网络（TSN）已被公认为工业4.0的关键使能技术之一，并已部署于众多任务关键型与安全关键型应用（如汽车和航空航天系统）中。鉴于这些应用对实时性的严苛要求，时间感知整形器（TAS）因其能实现确定性时序保障，在TSN的多种流量整形器中受到特别关注。近年来，针对TAS整形器已提出多种调度方法，声称能提升系统可调度性。然而，这些调度方法尚未得到全面评估——尤其缺乏实验对比——以系统理解其在不同应用场景下采用不同评价指标的性能表现。本文通过系统综述与实验研究填补了这一空白，聚焦现有基于TAS的TSN调度方法。我们首先对相关工作中采用的系统模型及其针对的具体问题进行归类，并概述TAS调度方法设计中的基本考量因素。随后，利用高保真仿真与真实TSN测试平台对十七种代表性方案开展广泛评估，并在合成场景与真实工业用例中对比其性能。基于这些实验研究，我们识别出各调度方法的局限性，并提炼出若干重要发现。期待本研究可为未来实时TSN调度研究提供基础知识与性能基准，从而对领域产生重要影响。