Impactless association methods for wi-fi based time-sensitive networks

Current safety-critical applications, found in domains such as automotive networking, automated industries, and control systems, require deterministic and latency-bounded end-to-end communication, currently not supported by best-effort networks. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) is the most feasible approach to fulfill such requirements. Originating from the wired domain, their application to the wireless domain is now attracting attention. Besides some advances in time synchronization and scheduling, essential policies such as association with a wireless TSN (W-TSN), have not been explored. This paper analyses the necessary tools for a prospective client to accomplish association with the W-TSN without affecting ongoing time-sensitive traffic. We introduce three beacon-based methods to pre-synchronize and pre-schedule nodes willing to associate with the network. On top of the first full-stack Software Defined Radio (SDR) based IEEE802.11/Wi-Fi design, the proposed approaches are developed and tested in a real-world environment. A delay analysis shows a worst-case association delay of up to 1.8 s, and high accuracy synchronization on prospective clients’ association frame receptions, with 100% of on-time arrivals, even with challenging scheduling timeslots as short as 128 \(\upmu\) $\mathrm{\mu }$ s.