Avnu Alliance delivers TSN conformance tests for industrial devices
November 28, 2017
These conformance tests ensure that the device or silicon conforms to the relevant IEEE standards, as well as additional requirements that Avnu has selected as necessary for system interoperability.
Nuremberg, Germany. Avnu Alliance has announced that the first set of Avnu Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) conformance test plans for time synchronization of industrial devices (or IEEE 802.1AS) are now available. These conformance tests ensure that a device conforms to relevant IEEE standards, as well as additional requirements that Avnu has selected as necessary for system interoperability. A working agreement between Avnu Alliance and OPC Foundation has also been established to provide conformance testing and certification of OPC UA over TSN devices. In the future, Avnu will also be able to test and certify other traffic shaping mechanisms, frame preemption, redundancy, ingress policing, strict priority, and security.
Avnu members have made open source code available for 802.1AS timing and synchronization in the OpenAvnu repository on GitHub. Avnu has outlined a certified system architecture and requirements for this industrial model built in a document entitled “Theory of Operation for TSN-enabled Industrial Systems.” This document introduces the fundamental mechanisms of a TSN system architecture; including time synchronization; quality of service (QoS) using scheduled transmission and network configuration; and walks through the requirements of several industrial use cases, such as how to integrate non-TSN technologies where needed.
Avnu will continue to support additional capabilities, including support for multiple IEEE 1588 profiles, guidelines for scaling to very large network architectures, centralized and distributed configuration for the network, and aggregation/composition of multiple networks into a single TSN-enabled network domain.
