Next generation real-time networks based on IT technologies

Ethernet-based networks have found their way into industrial communication more than a decade ago. However, while industry and academia developed Ethernet variants to also meet real-time and fault-tolerant requirements, recent standardization efforts within the IEEE 802 will broadly bring standard IT switched Ethernet in future industrial communication networks. As first standards of IEEE 802.1 time-sensitive networking (TSN) are becoming published at the time of this writing, we review these standards and formulate further research challenges that still go beyond current standard developments. Furthermore, we report on recent research results from the RetNet project that target these research challenges.