Achieve deterministic networking using IEEE 802.1Q TSN using IEEE 802.1Qbv TAS on a SmartNIC

1 Research Work

Advised by:- Dr. T V Prabhakar and Dr. Chandramani Singh
Brief: Achieve deterministic networking using IEEE 802.1Q TSN using IEEE 802.1Qbv TAS on a SmartNIC.
Tactile Internet applications such as telesurgery require haptic feedback with a round-trip time of a few milliseconds. Existing best-effort 802.1p Ethernet based networks, with priority scheduling for Virtual Local-Area Network (VLAN) traffic fail to provide hard latency guarantees for tactile flows. This is mainly because of the queuing delay of the flows competing for the same outgoing port on a switch. We leverage the concept of Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) which promises bounded low-latency using time-slotted data transmission. TSN is a set of standards being developed by the TSN Task Group, a part of the IEEE 802.1 Working Group. Furthermore, IEEE 802.1Qbv proposes Time-Aware Shaper (TAS) for Ethernet switches to minimize queueing latency and to guarantee latency bounds.
We build a TSN switch from scratch using SmartNICs (programmable networking hardware) and demonstrate the implementation challenges. We also implement support for PTP-based hardware synchronization on SmartNICs.