Towards Domain-Specific Time-Sensitive Information-Centric Networking Architecture

Due to increasing bandwidth requirements, Ethernet is replacing traditional technologies such as CAN bus within the industrial automation and automotive networks. To support the deterministic communication required in these systems, it is often combined with the IEEE 802.1Q Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) group of standards. Information-Centric Networking (ICN) is an appealing architecture for aiding the migration to Ethernet. It can map the content-based message identifiers of the CAN bus and support complex network topologies in those new systems. This work investigates ICN's interaction with TSN and how their combination can support real-time systems. By extending the EnGINE framework with Named-Data Networking (NDN) support, we provide a hardware-based experimental environment tailored to develop ICN-based TSN systems. We further propose an NDN-based architecture tailored for networked systems requiring low latency deterministic communication. We show that NDN on top of TSN is a promising approach on average fulfilling the strict delay requirements of 2 ms and jitter of 125 mu s in a seven-hop automotive network, with our approach further reducing the network overhead.