IRFS: A CQF Scheduling Method Integrating Queue Resources and Flow Features in Time-Sensitive Networking

Time-sensitive networking (TSN) has revolutionized Ethernet with real-time and deterministic transmission capabilities, making it one of the most potential solutions for future vehicular and industrial networks. Compared to time-aware shaper (TAS), the cyclic queuing and forwarding (CQF) protocol simplifies the gate control list (GCL) configuration process, reducing the deployment difficulty of TSN in large-scale networks. Much research has proposed incremental scheduling approaches for the CQF. However, existing methods often inadequately consider and insufficiently integrate network and flow characteristics, limiting scheduling performance. This paper introduces a novel CQF scheduling method, IRFS, which integrates queue resources and flow features for efficient searching of scheduling priority, routing path, and start offset. A priority sorting function is proposed that deeply combines network and flow characteristics while considering both spatial and temporal resource allocation. IRFS achieves efficient scheduling and load balancing by constructing combinations of $(flow, path, offset)$, where the elements respectively represent flow features, the spatial distribution, and the temporal distribution of resources. The IRFS is validated in different network scenarios, including simple, complex, and In-Vehicle Networking (IVN) settings. It is compared against other state-of-the-art CQF scheduling algorithm. The IRFS demonstrates superior performance in scheduling success rate, load balancing, and computation time across these scenarios.