Security-Aware Scheduling Method for Time-Sensitive Networking

The authenticity of information is the key security factor of system in time-sensitive networking (TSN). However, the direct introduction of traditional security authentication mechanism will lead to a significant reduction in schedulability of the system. The existing methods still have the problems of few application scenarios and high resource consumption. To address this problem, a security-aware scheduling method for TSN was proposed. Firstly, based on the traffic characteristics of TSN, a time-efficient one-time signature security mechanism was designed to provide efficient multicast source authentication for messages. Secondly, the corresponding security model was proposed to evaluate the mechanism and describe the impact of the security mechanism on tasks and traffic. Finally, the proposed security-aware scheduling method was modeled mathematically. On the basis of traditional scheduling constraints, some constraints related to security mechanisms were added. At the same time, the optimization objective was to minimize the end-to-end delay of applications, and constraint programming was used to solve the problem. Simulation results show that the introduction of the improved one-time signature mechanism can effectively protect the authenticity of key information in TSN, and has limited impact on scheduling. In multiple test cases of different sizes generated based on real industrial scenarios, the average end-to-end delay and bandwidth consumption of the generated applications only increased by 13.3% and 5.8% respectively. Compared with other similar methods, this method consumes less bandwidth, thus more suitable for TSN networks with strict bandwidth restrictions.