5G Configured Grant Scheduling for 5G-TSN Integration for the Support of Industry 4.0

Abstract

Factories are evolving towards digitalized databased ecosystems under the paradigm of the Industry 4.0 where new industrial services allow the implementation of more robust, resilient and customized manufacturing systems. Such services (e.g., digital twins, extended reality or cooperative robots) will require highly reliable and deterministic communication networks capable of supporting stringent latency and reliability requirements. 5G networks and their future evolution have the necessary capabilities to meet these requirements. However, the use of 5G in industrial environments requires its effective and efficient integration with Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), which is becoming the standard wired technology for Industry 4.0 environments. TSN provides unprecedented deterministic service levels with perfectly bounded latencies. The integration of the industrial 5G and TSN networks will be key to support the flexibility and determinism demanded by the Industry 4.0 paradigm. A critical aspect to achieve this integration is the coordination of the schedulers of both networks. TSN has information about the capabilities of the 5G-TSN integrated network, and it is in charge of deciding the path and scheduling for each TSN traffic flow. The scheduling in 5G must be done according to the scheduling decisions and information provided by TSN to guarantee the end-to-end latency requirements of TSN traffic. In this context, this paper proposes a novel Configured Grant scheduling scheme for 5G integrated into a TSN network that aims to meet the latency requirements of the different TSN flows. The proposed scheme exploits the information provided by TSN about the characteristics of the TSN traffic to coordinate its decision with the scheduling of TSN. This study demonstrates that the proposed scheduling scheme considerably increases the number of TSN flows that can be satisfactorily served in the integrated 5G-TSN network compared with a commonly used Configured Grant (CG) scheduling scheme.