Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) has been recognized as one of the key
enabling technologies for Industry 4.0 and has been deployed in many time- and
mission-critical industrial applications, e.g., automotive and aerospace
systems. Given the stringent real-time communication requirements raised by
these applications, the Time-Aware Shaper (TAS) draws special attention among
the many traffic shapers developed for TSN, due to its ability to achieve
deterministic latency guarantees. Extensive efforts on the designs of
scheduling methods for TAS shapers have been reported in recent years to
improve the system schedulability, each with their own distinct focuses and
concerns. However, these scheduling methods have yet to be thoroughly
evaluated, especially through experimental comparisons, to provide a
systematical understanding on their performance using different evaluation
metrics in various application scenarios. In this paper, we fill this gap by
presenting a comprehensive experimental study on the existing TAS-based
scheduling methods for TSN. We first categorize the system models employed in
these work along with their formulated problems, and outline the fundamental
considerations in the designs of TAS-based scheduling methods. We then perform
extensive evaluation on 16 representative solutions and compare their
performance under both synthetic scenarios and real-life industrial use cases.
Through these experimental studies, we identify the limitations of individual
scheduling methods and highlight several important findings. This work will
provide foundational knowledge for the future studies on TSN real-time
scheduling problems, and serve as the performance benchmarking for scheduling
method development in TSN.Comment: 22 pages, ac