Bridging TSN and 5G networks: Prototype design and evaluation for real-time embedded systems

Integrating Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) with 5G cellular networks facilitates high-bandwidth, low-latency end-to-end communication in networked embedded systems. An integrated TSN-5G network has the potential to support predictable and deterministic end-to-end communication, as well as to signif...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of systems architecture Vol. 168; p. 103531
Main Authors: Satka, Zenepe, Ashjaei, Mohammad, Nord, Josefina, Mayta, William Rosales, Nordin, Didrik, Ragnarsson, Daniel, Mubeen, Saad
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier B.V 01.11.2025
Subjects:
5g Mobile Communication Systems
Automation
Design And Implementations
Embedded Systems
End-to-end Communication
Gateways (computer Networks)
Heterogeneous Real-time Network
Heterogeneous Real-time Networks
Interactive Computer Systems
Interoperability
Network Architecture
Network Components
Networked Embedded Systems
Prototype Designs
Real Time Network
Real Time Systems
Synchronization
Time Synchronization
Time-sensitive Networking
TSN
Wireless Networks
5G
Time-sensitive networking
Heterogeneous real-time networks
Networked embedded systems
TSN
Time synchronization
ISSN:1383-7621, 1873-6165
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Integrating Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) with 5G cellular networks facilitates high-bandwidth, low-latency end-to-end communication in networked embedded systems. An integrated TSN-5G network has the potential to support predictable and deterministic end-to-end communication, as well as to significantly enhance scalability, particularly in industrial automation, by providing flexibility, efficiency, and responsiveness. This paper aims to facilitate the end-to-end (E2E) communication over the integrated TSN-5G networks, by addressing two of the main challenges: (1) design and implementation of an effective TSN-5G gateway that not only ensures an effective forwarding mechanism to translate the traffic among both networks, but also maps the TSN traffic to the corresponding 5G quality-of-service profiles to ensure the timing requirements of highly critical traffic, and (2) establishment of clock synchronization across all network components to support the E2E communication in TSN-5G networks. The paper outlines the design and implementation of a robust TSN-5G gateway that bridges TSN and 5G network architectures, ensuring seamless interoperability between them. We utilize a standalone private 5G network within a controlled lab environment to establish the E2E communication for the TSN-5G network, with a particular emphasizes on analyzing latencies and jitter to provide valuable insights for industrial implementation. Moreover, the gateway facilitates a time synchronization approach, to enable time coordination between network components that supports E2E communication on TSN-5G networks considering the hardware limitation. Our findings indicate that achieving latencies below 20 ms is feasible in an integrated TSN-5G network using the proposed configuration of a private 5G setup with a channel bandwidth of 40 MHz.
ISSN:1383-7621
1873-6165
DOI:10.1016/j.sysarc.2025.103531