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Contents

What is Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN)?

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a set of IEEE 802.1 standards targeting the data link layer, with active development since 2012 and growing adoption in industrial products. Its central objective is to provide standardized mechanisms that guarantee deterministic communication over Ethernet and Wi-Fi networks where traffic of heterogeneous temporal criticality coexists — from latency-sensitive operational technology (OT) control flows to best-effort IT traffic.

This convergence on a common Ethernet backbone simplifies industrial infrastructure, reducing reliance on proprietary networks and fieldbuses while enabling interoperability across devices from different manufacturers. Established industrial protocols such as Profinet and TTEthernet can be integrated within the same framework. Major automation vendors, including Siemens and ABB, have already incorporated TSN support into their product lines, signaling an industry-wide shift toward standards-based deterministic networking.

Application domains and outlook

TSN has strong prospects across several sectors, including industrial automation (Industry 4.0/5.0), automotive, aeronautics, and the power sector. It also underpins broader initiatives such as DetNet (Deterministic Internet), which extends deterministic guarantees beyond the local network.

Adoption rates vary considerably by domain. In professional audio/video, MILAN represents the first TSN profile to achieve broad deployment. In manufacturing, the focus lies on OT/IT convergence — a central concern for Industry 4.0/5.0 architectures. In electrical substations, TSN facilitates integration of the IEC 61850 standard and eases interconnection with data centers and AI infrastructure. Automotive applications leverage TSN to standardize in-vehicle networks and enable integration with intelligent transportation systems (ITS). In aerospace, TSN is viewed as a promising path toward improved SWaP (size, weight, and power) efficiency; civil adoption is expected to be gradual given stringent certification requirements, whereas military adoption appears to be progressing at a faster pace.

Research Group

The group is affiliated with GaZ (I3A, University of Zaragoza) and pursues five main research lines.

  1. Scheduling. Development of fast, optimal schedulers for TSN, including joint path selection and scheduling with integrated fault-tolerance mechanisms.
  2. Parametric modeling. Parametric modeling to handle variable parameters arising from physical conditions, with a sweeping system for pre-deployment analysis across parameter ranges. The target application is integration into a CNC to accelerate the configuration and update cycle of deployed TSN systems.
  3. Emulation. Software support for systems lacking dedicated TSN hardware — such as IEEE 802.1AS synchronization or 802.1Qbv TAS — enabling use in testbeds prior to physical deployment. The emulation work also targets SDN and datacenter environments, where TSN is a key enabler for cloudifying OT functionalities through spatial proximity to data center infrastructure. The group maintains its own emulator under active development.
  4. Kernel and hardware configuration. Profiling, precise timestamping, and real-time configuration of the Linux kernel and underlying hardware, including industrial multiprocessor platforms and Intel NICs with TCC (Time-Coordinated Computing).
  5. Kernel-bypass techniques. Including DPDK, XDP, and eBPF — to exploit the parallelism of modern multicore architectures in time-critical frame processing paths.

The group operates a testbed comprising five end stations and five bridges, currently under expansion.

Team

Senior researchers

  • Department of Computer Science and Systems Engineering / I3A, University of Zaragoza:
    • Prof. José Luis Briz, PhD
    • Prof. Juan Segarra Flor, PhD
  • Center for Research and Advanced Studies (CINVESTAV) Guadalajara, Mexico:
    • Prof. Antonio Ramírez-Treviño, PhD

Industry collaborators

  • Héctor Blanco-Alcaine, MSc (Intel Corporation | Intel Deutschland GmbH)

PhD students

  • Alitzel Torres-Macías (CINVESTAV – University of Zaragoza)
  • Álex Gracia Rodríguez (University of Zaragoza)

The group also supervises a selection of final-degree and master’s students, who receive specific training in the technologies described above and typically express interest in continuing their work in this area.

Recent publications

  • A. Galilea Torres-Macías, J. Segarra Flor, J. Luis Briz Velasco, A. Ramírez-Treviño and H. Blanco-Alcaine, “Fast IEEE 802.1Qbv Gate Scheduling Through Integer Linear Programming,” in IEEE Access, vol. 12, pp. 111239–111250, 2024, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2024.3440828.
  • Á. Gracia, A. G. Torres-Macías, J. Segarra, J. L. Briz, A. Ramírez-Treviño, H. Blanco-Alcaine. “Embedded reconfiguration of TSN: Dual reconfiguration with dropping and reclaiming.” 7th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS) – Industrial Challenge. July 8–11, 2025, Brussels, Belgium.
  • Álex Gracia, José Luis Briz, Héctor Blanco-Alcaine, Juan Segarra, Alitzel G. Torres-Macías, and Antonio Ramírez-Treviño. 2025. “Characterization of latency and jitter in TSN emulation.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.02133.
  • A. Gracia, J. L. Briz Velasco, H. Alcaine, J. Segarra, A. Torres, A. Ramírez-Treviño. “Cracking down overheads in TSN emulation over Mininet.” Time-Sensitive Networking and Applications (TSN&A). Stuttgart, 1–2 Oct. 2024.
  • A. G. Torres-Macías, A. Ramírez-Treviño, J. L. Briz, J. Segarra, H. Blanco-Alcaine. “Modeling Time-Sensitive Networking Using Timed Continuous Petri Nets.” IFAC-PapersOnLine, Volume 58, Issue 1, 2024, Pages 300–305, ISSN 2405-8963. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ifacol.2024.07.051

Collaboration opportunities

The group is open to collaboration in two broad modalities:

  • Direct application of the group’s expertise to specific technical problems — particularly profiling, fast-packet processing, and any aspect amenable to performance acceleration through kernel and hardware configuration or techniques such as eBPF/XDP and AF_PACKET.
  • Formal industry–research partnerships, which may involve test or demonstration infrastructures for key enabling technologies (TSN and related), or technology transfer activities ranging from proof-of-concept to prototype and higher TRL levels.

A TSN primer

Main components

A TSN network consists of two principal node types: end stations and bridges (switches). Both are synchronized via the IEEE 802.1AS profile of the IEEE 1588 PTP specification, achieving synchronization on the order of nanoseconds. End stations — PLCs, servers running vPLCs, and similar devices — originate and terminate traffic, transmitting information (e.g., from sensors to actuators) under guaranteed timing constraints in terms of both deadline and jitter.

Domain requirements and traffic classes

Latency and jitter requirements have tightened progressively across application domains to accommodate increasingly demanding use cases:

Sector Application Latency Jitter
Health Tele-Surgery, Haptic Feedback 3–10 ms < 2 ms
Manufacturing Industrial Automation, Control Systems 0.2 µs–0.5 ms (1 Gbit/s); 25 µs–2 ms (100 Mbit/s) Meet latency req.
Energy Power Grid Systems ≈ 8 ms Few µs
Banking High-Frequency Trading < 1 ms Few µs
Aerospace AFDX Variants 1–128 ms Few µs
Automotive and transport Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) 100–250 µs Few µs
Automotive and transport Power Train, Chassis Control < 10 µs Few µs
Automotive and transport Traffic Efficiency & Safety < 5 ms Few µs
Infotainment Augmented Reality 7–20 ms Few µs
Professional Audio/Video — 2–50 ms < 100 µs

To address this diversity, TSN defines six domain-specific profiles:

  • IEEE P802.1DP — Aerospace onboard Ethernet
  • IEEE/IEC 60802 — Industrial automation
  • IEEE P802.1DG — Automotive in-vehicle communications
  • IEEE P802.1CM — Fronthaul
  • IEEE P802.1DF — Service provider networks
  • IEEE P802.1BA — Audio/video bridging (AVB)

Each profile defines traffic classes relevant to its sector. The industrial automation profile (IEC/IEEE 60802) distinguishes six:

  • Latencies below 2 ms, no congestion loss, strict synchronization, fixed frame sizes (30–100 bytes).
  • Periodic, time-sensitive traffic with latencies between 2 and 20 ms and defined bandwidth requirements.
  • Aperiodic traffic — alarms, operator commands, critical control events — with frame sizes of 100–1500 bytes.
  • Highly critical periodic traffic supporting network management functions such as gPTP and SRP.
  • Sporadic, medium-criticality traffic without strict temporal constraints (diagnostics, logs).
  • Non-critical traffic with no timing constraints.

Bridges and traffic management

Bridges enforce prioritized transmission through traffic shapers and dynamic scheduling aligned with the traffic classes of the applicable profile. IEEE 802.1Q supports the dynamic admission of new flows via a hitless set-and-hold mechanism — modifications are staged in an administrative state while the network continues operating under the current operational state, then atomically committed at a designated cycle boundary without disrupting ongoing transmissions.

In practice, configuration is typically centralized. A Centralized User Configuration node (CUC) defines the network topology and communication flow requirements, and passes this specification to a Centralized Network Configuration node (CNC), which is responsible for planning, verification, and deployment. IEEE 802.1Q further encompasses specifications for network management, fault tolerance, and quality of service.

Links and contact

Prof. José Luis Briz
DIIS/I3A – EINA, Univ. Zaragoza
briz@unizar.es