An OMNeT++ simulation model for Proactive Transmission of Replicated Frames mechanism over TSN

Abstract

[eng] In the last years growing interest has been shown in deploying Ethernet in control applications, where the timeliness and the reliability of the systems used are crucial to guarantee correct service and safety in the environment. In this regard, a new IEEE task group is working in providing solutions for the aforementioned problems. The proposed solution consists in a set of technical standards that introduce new mechanisms in Ethernet technologies. This set of standards is usually referred to as Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). However, even though TSN includes more than 20 different documents, so far only 3 of them are devoted to increase the reliability in networks. Moreover, TSN does not standardize any time redundancy mechanism in the layer 2 in order to tolerate temporary faults. It only includes spatial redundancy, which is not a suitable solution to tolerate temporary faults. Thus, the research group in which this Master project was developed has recently proposed a time redundancy mechanism, called Proactive Transmission of Replicated Frames (PTRF). The mechanism consists in the transmission of several copies of the same message to ensure that it has correctly reached the receiver. Currently, there are three different approaches of the mechanism. In this project we develop a simulation model for PTRF, which is then used in various simulations to validate the design of the mechanism, as well as to compare the three proposed approaches in time redundancy. Moreover, we also perform experiments where we mix time and spatial redundancy, in order to show the impact on the overall reliability of the network.