Mechanism design for the end-to-end deterministic transmissions with decoupled time domains

Abstract: This paper proposes an innovative end-to-end deterministic network mechanism to achieve delay-bounded transmissions across multiple network domains. The proposed mechanism installs discrete shapers at the edge of the network domains, which serves to decouple the clock domains of different networks. Thereby, the challenges associated with cross-domain clock synchronization that are inherent in state-of-the-art deterministic mechanisms are mitigated, e.g., high complexity during the system implementation and the traffic scheduling. Moreover, the proposed mechanism enhances the availability of the deterministic networking, i.e., not only periodic deterministic traffic, but also aperiodic deterministic traffic and stochastic flows are enabled to be served. Furthermore, an auction-based online scheduling algorithm is developed to improve network efficiency and reduce cost. Simulation results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively realize the end-to-end delay-bounded transmission across multiple domains. Meanwhile, the cross-domain latency could also be reduced compared to the existing methods.