On the Reliability of Time-Sensitive Network Infrastructures

Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) becomes increasingly important for a wide variety of business sectors as it offers advanced means to implement data communication with hard real-time constraints using standardized Ethernet. To counter faulty transmissions and lost data, TSN comes with Frame Replication and Elimination for Reliability (FRER) that provides mechanisms to redundantly send data frames on multiple network paths from a source to a destination. Although clearly increasing fault-tolerance, the FRER sub-standard misses formulas to derive the resulting communication reliability, i. e., the probability that at least one of the replicated frames finally reaches the destination. Determining this reliability, however, is essential for designing fault-tolerant and resilient network infrastructures. This paper shows two methods for calculating the communication reliability that are evaluated on network topologies with increasing redundancy. The advanced algorithm intelligently decomposes the network topology in order to compute accurate results in acceptable time.