Time-Sensitive Network Routing via Topology Reduction
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current approaches to time and route planning in industrial networks, particularly for real-time communication, face challenges in efficiently calculating deterministic time plans that meet real-time and bandwidth requirements, often neglecting spatial isolation of communication streams, leading to increased complexity and limited solution spaces.
Innovation Solution
A pre-processing step is introduced to exclude impossible solutions before solving the reduced ILP problem, significantly reducing the number of conditions and variables without excluding valid solutions, and a directed graph model is used to represent the network, allowing for full duplex connections and separate handling of time-critical and best-effort traffic.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If joint route and time planning is performed without pre-processing, then complete solution space is considered, but calculation complexity increases significantly and scalability deteriorates
Solution Approach 1:
The patent applies preliminary action by performing pre-processing steps before the main ILP optimization. Specifically, it calculates reduced topologies that identify only the relevant edges and nodes for each source-destination pair, and pre-determines feasible routes. This preliminary filtering reduces the problem size fed into the ILP solver, maintaining solution completeness while dramatically reducing calculation complexity and improving scalability.
2Manufacturing precision
If ILP model includes all possible routes and edges, then optimal solutions can be found, but model size becomes unmanageable and computation time increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts only the necessary subset of edges and nodes from the complete network topology to form reduced topologies. For each source-destination pair, it identifies and extracts only those edges that lie on feasible routes, excluding all irrelevant edges and nodes. This extraction maintains the ability to find optimal solutions within the feasible subspace while making the ILP model size manageable and computation tractable.
3Reliability
If spatial isolation through routing is combined with temporal isolation through time planning, then communication stream isolation is improved, but search space complexity increases even further
Solution Approach 1:
The patent segments the network topology into multiple reduced topologies, each corresponding to a specific source-destination pair. By dividing the complete network into these smaller, pair-specific sub-topologies, the approach maintains spatial isolation through routing while keeping each optimization problem manageable. The segmentation prevents the exponential growth of search space complexity that would result from treating the entire network as a single optimization problem.
Data Source
AI summary
The invention relates to a method of routing in a network. The network consists of a plurality of network nodes. The network may have different interlinks and connections from one network node to the others. An actual topology for the network is thus created. According to the invention, the routing is performed in two phases. First, the number of possible links to the network nodes is reduced in a reduction phase. A reduced topology is thus created in which network nodes or links to network nodes that are not required for route finding are discarded. In a subsequent routing and time planning phase, an optimized route to a network node in the reduced topology is then calculated.