Deterministic Network

Abstract

The Internet provides best-effort services using packet switching. However, in recent years, people proposed “the industrial Internet” and tried to use the Internet for industries instead of using it just for consumer users. These industrial applications, together with some emerging applications, demand that networks should be able to provide deterministic quality of service (e.g., delay, jitter, and loss). Such networks are named deterministic networks (DetNets). In this chapter, we briefly introduce the framework and the key techniques towards DetNet, most of which are being standardized by the IETF DetNet working group. The framework gives an overview of how DetNet works for application flows with deterministic performance requirements. The key technologies address different issues in the data plane, control plane, and management plane. In the data plane, we first describe the protocol stack, packet encapsulation formats, and a data plane network model, which are fundamental to the operation of DetNet nodes. We then introduce the shaping and queueing algorithms that can be used by DetNet nodes to control the processing latency, which is the most challenging task in DetNet. DetNet also supports redundancy-based schemes to protect application flows from packet loss. In the control plane, we summarize the existing standards and challenges of computing feasible paths and establishing the computed paths for DetNet flows. In the management plane, we show how DetNet flows report their flow features and specify their performance requirements, and we also briefly show some challenging management tasks and security issues exclusively specific to DetNet. Although DetNet is a promising and important technique for many use cases, DetNet still has a long way to achieve mature implementation and wide deployment in real-world networks.