Extending Time Sensitive Networking over Next Generation Wi-Fi

Time-critical applications require time-synchronized computing and deterministic communication between distributed components. Time-critical systems like industrial processes, may involve time-critical control tasks that typically run over highly reliable and synchronous wired links (e.g. TSN over Ethernet). Current wireless technologies, such as 802.11 and Cellular Systems, have not yet demonstrated capabilities that guarantee low latencies (e.g., under 10 ms) and high reliability. Enabling reliable and deterministic low-latency wireless communication would lead to reduced wiring costs, greater deployment flexibility, and improved system mobility; these are key emerging application attributes in flexible manufacturing (Industry 4.0), wireless autonomous systems, and tactile teleoperation. This submission touches on the opportunities and open challenges in extending existing Ethernet-based TSN standards (e.g. 802.1Qbv) over wireless technologies. A new time-aware operation mode is proposed to enable the demonstration of TSN applications over Wi-Fi. The proposed time-aware mode leverages time synchronization capabilities to control the typical random access behavior of the 802.11 MAC layer to enable scheduled transmissions and provide tighter latency bounds. This work enables experimentation of applications and network configurations required to meet TSN requirements and understand the performance limits and constraints of unlicensed spectrum operation.