Robustness and Reliability Provided by Deterministic Packet Networks (TSN and DetNet)

Converged networks require new service protection functionalities to ensure reliable and robust communications. This paper provides insights into the evolution of deterministic communication and the importance of service protection in converged networks. We examine the per-packet-based replication/elimination service protection mechanism, ongoing standardization efforts, and potential areas for further development. We also explore the practical implementation of the service protection technique in real network scenarios, including its impact on operation and maintenance. The main contributions of the paper are: (1) new cloud-specific extensions to the service protection functionality, (2) introduction of redundancy domains to avoid replication/elimination-related failure propagation, (3) new service protection specific extensions to the network operation toolset, and (4) new diagnostic capabilities to monitor the healthiness of the service protection functionalities. Additionally, we evaluate the effectiveness and operation of newly proposed service protection extensions based on experimental results from a real 5G testbed.