I am currently doing research in the field of Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and recently had the idea to extend OVS with TSN functionality. In my opinion this would create various possibilities to realize deterministic real-time networks virtualized via mininet for research and education. TSN is specified by a number of IEEE standards and aims to extend Ethernet according to IEEE 802.1 by deterministic latencies, QoS and bandwidth reservation mechanisms.
To realize this, a minimum of three steps are necessary: (1) Time synchronization via gPTP (IEEE Std. 802.1AS-Rev) (2) Allocation of traffic in eight priority classes and corresponding classification in eight queues -> this is realised by the PCP field in the VLAN header (3) Support of the Time Aware Shaper (IEEE 802.1Qbv) - here each queue is assigned a so-called transmission gate, which is opened and closed in a time-triggered manner. The time synchronization is possible via already available deamons like ptp4l, also the queuing of traffic is not the problem. However, I have been thinking about how to integrate the Time Aware Shaper into OVS for quite some time. In the documentation of the OVS project I found different approaches to integrate QoS into OVS, but they don't seem to be the right ones for my idea: QoS Egress Policing when using DPDK apparently only allows the possibility to implement DiffServ and I did not want to have DPDK as dependency. In the installation tutorial there is the hint that 'tc' can be used for ingress policing. With tc-taprio one can implement the Time Aware Shaper, so maybe that could be the hint, but the TAS is not an ingress but an egress policy. Furthermore it seems to be hard to integrate it into mininet at the end of the road. So my first naive approach was to integrate this functionality directly into OVS. Since I have no further practical experience with OVS, I wanted to start the discussion here and elaborate if this is a worthwhile idea at all. I am grateful for any feedback. Best regards, Stefan _______________________________________________ discuss mailing list disc...@openvswitch.org https://mail.openvswitch.org/mailman/listinfo/ovs-discuss
