Negotiating strict latency limits for dynamic real-time services in vehicular time-sensitive networks

Abstract

Future vehicles are expected to dynamically deploy in-vehicle applications within a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) while critical services continue to operate under hard real-time constraints. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) on the in-vehicle Ethernet layer is dedicated to ensure deterministic communication between critical services; its Credit-Based Shaper (CBS) supports dynamic resource reservations. However, the dynamic nature of service deployment challenges network resource configuration, since any new reservation may change the latency of already validated flows. Standard methods of worst-case latency analysis for CBS have been found incorrect, and current TSN stream reservation procedures lack mechanisms to signal application layer Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements or verify deadlines. In this paper, we propose and validate a QoS negotiation scheme that interacts with the TSN network controller to reserve resources while ensuring latency bounds. For the first time, this work comparatively evaluates reservation schemes using worst-case analysis and simulations of a realistic In-Vehicle Network (IVN) and demonstrates their impact on QoS guarantees, resource utilization, and setup times. We find that only one reservation scheme utilizing per-queue delay budgets and network calculus provides valid configurations and guarantees acceptable latency bounds throughout the IVN. The proposed service negotiation mechanism efficiently establishes 450 vehicular network reservations in just 11 ms.