Time Sensitive Networking for Future Enabling Technologies: Overview and Measurement Issues for Metrological Characterization

The consolidation of Industry 4.0 and the perspective of the evolution toward the new Industry 5.0 paradigm are drastically accelerating the integration and the performance improvement of critical enabling technologies, as well as the uptake of new ones inside all industrial processes and future emerging applications. For example, increasingly sophisticated sensors and ultra-high-definition cameras, machine learning algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence are now starting to work together effectively. They can deliver real-world advantages for many applications, from manufacturing processes to advanced applications in modern vehicles, aircraft, and surveillance. Communication technologies play a fundamental role in these aims, and they have to ensure proper bandwidths, security, latencies, synchronisation, packet loss, reliability, and interoperability. Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) represents the technology that fulfils the mandatory requirements for these parameters. To satisfy the related (hard) constraints and to speed up the diffusion of TSN, it becomes of paramount importance to accurately measure and characterise the relevant features of all the devices involved in the channel access and data transfer operations, starting from the network nodes and bridges, up to the communication links. In this framework, the paper aims to briefly analyse the TSN domain and the general measurement issues (methods, procedures, test sites, test setup) to address the metrological performance assessment of the network devices involved in such applications.