Time Sensitive Networking for future enabling technologies: measurement methods and metrological characterization in hybrid wired/wireless scenarios

The consolidation of Industry 4.0 and the perspective of its evolution toward the new paradigm of the digital industry, i.e. Industry 5.0, are drastically accelerating the integration and the performance improvement of key enabling technologies, as well as the uptake of new ones inside all industrial processes and future emerging applications. For example, increasingly sophisticated sensors and ultra-high-definition cameras, machine learning algorithms, and Artificial Intelligence are now starting to work together effectively and deliver real-world advantages for many applications, from manufacturing processes to advanced applications in modern vehicles, aircraft, and surveillance. To these aims, communication technologies play a fundamental role, and they have to assure proper bandwidths, security, latencies, synchronization, packet loss, reliability, and interoperability. Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) represents the enabling technology for fulfilling the mandatory requirements for these parameters. Indeed, industrial suppliers, important IT vendors, and silicon providers such as Broadcom, Cisco, Intel, and National Instruments are collaborating within the IEEE802 standards family working group to update Ethernet protocols for time-critical data in IIoT applications. Furthermore, a number of technical standards have been developed by IEEE, IETF, and IEC for covering several aspects, from basic specifications to network configuration and management, up to specific time synchronization protocols. Beyond wired communication technologies, big attention is paid to the new wireless solutions, since they offer well-known advantages concerning the wired ones. However, electromagnetic issues such as interferences, co-existence within the band and adjacent channels, and communication path can affect the expectations. In all cases, to fulfill the required (hard) constraints and to speed up the diffusion of TSN, it becomes of paramount importance to accurately measure and characterize the relevant features of all the devices involved in the channel access and data transfer operations, starting from the network nodes and bridges, up to the communication links. To these aims, the scientific and technical literature lacks suitable proposals tuned to the state of the art of modern communication technologies and adaptable for TSN. In this scenario, the project is focused on the definition and the experimental validation of measurement methods and protocols to be used in TSN frameworks. In particular, the research activity will involve a preliminary study for updating the state of the art on the new applications demanding TSN and the measurement techniques for the TSN context. Then, the design and realization of a suitable experimental test bed, and a large experimental campaign will allow the designing and fine-tuning of measurement methods and procedures addressed to reliably characterize the metrological features of the systems involved.