The Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) Task Group has standardised different mechanisms to provide Ethernet with hard real-time guarantees and reliability in layer 2 of the network architecture. Specifically, TSN proposes using space redundancy to increase the reliability of Ethernet networks, but using space redundancy to tolerate temporary faults is not a cost-effective solution. For this reason, we propose to use time redundancy to tolerate temporary faults in the links of TSN-based networks. Specifically, in previous works we proposed the Proactive Transmission of Replicated Frames (PTRF) mechanism to tolerate temporary faults in the links. Now, in this work we present a series of models of TSN and PTRF developed using PRISM, a probabilistic model checker that can be used to evaluate the reliability of systems. After that, we carry out a parametric sensitivity analysis of the reliability achievable by TSN and PTRF and we show that we can increase the reliability of TSN-based networks using PTRF to tolerate temporary faults in the links of TSN networks. This is the first work that presents a quantitative analysis of the reliability of TSN networks.
Keywords: Proactive Transmission of Replicated Frames; Time-Sensitive Networking; reliability analysis; time redundancy.