TOWARDS A SMART AND EFFICIENT TELECOM INFRASTRUCTURE MEETING CURRENT AND FUTURE INDUSTRY NEEDS (TIMING) is a project funded by the Ministerio de Asuntos Económicos y Transformación Digital and the European Union – NextGenerationEU. TIMING consists of three Subprojects (SP) that will collectively design, implement, and validate a solution to enable e2e reliable TSN services supported by operators’ infrastructures that are currently carrying on a best effort basis. TIMING has identified Industry 4.0 as a key vertical. 

Project References: TIMING SP-1: TSI-063000-2021-145 - TIMING SP-2: TSI-063000-2021-148 - TIMING SP-3: TSI-063000-2021-149

TIMING targets the design of use cases (e.g., industrial robotics), prototyping and demonstration of end-to-end TSN services in intra and inter -TSN domains. Accurate reference timing delivery and QoS/scheduling enhancements will be investigated. From an end-to-end perspective, TSN services entail the support of operators’ transport networks that are currently carrying traffic from users, business, and datacenter (DC), just to mention a few on a BE basis. Such traffic is commonly encapsulated at Layer 2 for traffic engineering purposes and transmitted over an optical transport network. As soon as operators’ networks provide support to TSN traffic, scheduling and traffic shaping will guarantee the committed QoS of TSN flows and allow for the coexistence of TSN and BE traffic on the same network infrastructure. One problem of providing end-to-end TSN flows is synchronization of multiple administrative domains. Such synchronization requirements can be relaxed by enforcing simple strict-priority selection on selected queues of the time-aware traffic shaper. In addition, TSN and BE traffic coexistence could have a negative impact on the BE traffic, as resources allocated to TSN flows would reduce those available for the former.