Configured Grant Scheduling for the Support of TSN Traffic in 5G and Beyond Industrial Networks

2026-06-30

AI Summary

This work addresses the inherent lack of deterministic communication support in native 5G networks, which struggles to meet the stringent bounded latency and high reliability requirements of Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) in industrial scenarios. The paper proposes a deeply integrated 5G-TSN configuration grant scheduling scheme that achieves, for the first time, cross-domain joint scheduling. By leveraging key characteristics of TSN traffic—such as periodicity, packet size, and arrival timing—the authors design a deterministic resource allocation algorithm. This approach overcomes the capacity and flexibility limitations of existing solutions, significantly enhancing the network’s ability to support heterogeneous TSN flows with diverse periods while simultaneously guaranteeing end-to-end latency bounds and improving resource utilization efficiency.

Abstract

5G and beyond networks can facilitate the digital transformation of manufacturing and support more flexible and reconfigurable factories with ubiquitous mobile connectivity. This requires integrating 5G networks with industrial networks that increasingly rely on TSN (Time Sensitive Networking) to support deterministic communications with bounded latencies. Deterministic communications are critical for many industrial applications, but 5G does not natively support deterministic communications. To address this limitation, this study proposes the coordination of the 5G and TSN schedulers and presents a novel 5G configured grant scheduling scheme to support TSN traffic. The scheme uses information about the characteristics of the TSN traffic (packet size, periodicity, and arrival time) to coordinate its scheduling decisions with the TSN scheduler. The study demonstrates that the proposed scheme outperforms the state-of-the-art in the capacity to support multiple TSN traffic flows with different periodicities.

Problem

• 5G
• Time Sensitive Networking
• deterministic communications
• configured grant scheduling
• industrial networks

Innovation

• Configured Grant Scheduling
• Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN)
• 5G Industrial Networks
• Deterministic Communication
• Scheduler Coordination