How Will TSN Ethernet Impact the Future of Embedded Computing?

March 1, 2025

Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) Ethernet is a real-time networking capability that is being developed by a growing number of embedded computing companies for the earliest stages of adoption by aerospace and defense manufacturers and their suppliers. According to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) TSN working group, it is a set of standards that provides deterministic connectivity within IEEE 802-aligned networks.

Nigel Forrester is the Director of Product Strategy for Concurrent Technologies, a UK-based provider of high performance embedded computing solutions for aerospace, defense and many other industries. Check out our interview with Forrester about the potential impact of TSN Ethernet on new and legacy aerospace and defense applications, and how it is being adopted by manufacturers and system integrators below.

Aerospace & Defense Technology (A&DT): What is TSN Ethernet?

Nigel Forrester: It is a set of IEEE standards that improve Ethernet. What do I mean by that? I mean, it meets the needs of real time control systems by allowing deterministic communication over that Ethernet fabric. And by deterministic, I mean highly repeatable from a timescale perspective. And it does that by providing predictable latency and timing accuracy.

TSN Ethernet could be an ideal embedded networking standard for size and weight-constrained technologies such as drones, because it allows for a reduction in the cabling required to establish the network. (Image: Zape/Adobe Stock)

It’s really about real time communication using an Ethernet fabric. That’s what it is. How does it work? It builds on a number of key premises. The first thing is time synchronization. Using existing IEEE protocols like the precision timing protocol, 1588, TSN synchronizes clocks across all the devices on the network. What that does, is it provides a highly accurate common reference point using a designated grand master clock. That’s really important because if you’re going to have time communication, you have to make sure that every device is synchronized to the same time and a very accurate time within that system. That’s the first core part of it.

Another one of the really key parts is setting up various quality of service mechanisms. Effectively, these are like priority-based scheduling and traffic shaping, and what they do is they prioritize the time critical data over non-time critical data. That network scheduling enables a mechanism that reserves time slots for the critical data streams.

By reserving time slots, that gives you predictable transmission with minimal latency and jitter, and then the time shaping is there. If you define time windows for the data transmission, the time sensitive networking shaping capability manages the flow of traffic. TSN also uses redundant links and protocols to provide multiple paths for time critical traffic. If one link gets broken, then you have a backup link that you can fall back on.

TSN is not one standard in its own right. It’s a bit of a smorgasbord of different standards. For different industries, different elements of TSN are required.

A&DT: When you look at the types of networking interfaces, protocols and standards featured on in-service military ground vehicles, aircraft, drones and other platforms today, how do those legacy networks compare to what TSN can provide?

The Hermod II, pictured here, is an example of a Commercial off the Shelf TSN Ethernet switch developed by Concurrent. (Image: Concurrent Technologies)

Forrester: There certainly are lots of legacy networks and protocols in use today. From an airframe perspective, you’ve got things like MIL-STD-1553 and ARINC 429, and possibly 629. If it’s a ground vehicle, you might have CAN Bus or even FlexRay if it’s a relatively new vehicle. I think the key here is that those legacy protocols, they’ve been around for many years. They work really well. There’s nothing really that TSN is looking to do better than those legacy protocols. But what it can do is, if you think about, especially in the drone, be it a land, air, or sea drone, they are battery powered and very often they have to run for long periods of time. So size, weight, power, and actually cost, is perhaps the most critical consideration for those types of platforms.

If you can standardize on a single Ethernet network, all your control capability and applications within that platform, that dramatically reduces the weight and the power required to enable the system. Think of a single Ethernet cable running through the platform rather than multiple 1553 CAN Bus or serial port type cables. In the long term, that really gives you a cost advantage because those legacy interfaces are quite difficult to support.

So it’s really more about how you can make the platforms better and more flexible rather than how do you actually make the interfaces run faster or more responsive. A lot of these legacy interfaces, they do a good job, they just are not really fit for purpose in the long term.

A&DT: Speaking of the long term, what is the current status of TSN Ethernet within the aerospace and defense industry? Is it already being adopted by manufacturers?

Forrester: It’s starting. Remember that in the aerospace industry, things do tend to have quite long qualification sample cycles. So if you ask me, has Concurrent shipped multiple TSN products? That answer is absolutely. Have we received many RFPs from U.S. and UK companies explicitly calling out TSN as a mandatory requirement for new platforms? Again, absolutely. Do we actually have lots of TSN products deployed today? Well, no, if I’m honest, but it’s coming and not only on new platforms. We’ve actually seen some opportunities to add TSN to existing and legacy platforms during their technology transition cycles.

Those legacy interfaces are not going to go away. The will have to co-exist with TSN in some cases decades. Because if you have a platform with a legacy interface today, it’s probably unlikely that you’re going to completely rip it all out and start over again.

A&DT: If you look out over the next 5-10 years, what type of impact could TSN Ethernet have on the design and form factors of embedded military computing systems and components?

Forrester: I wholly believe that TSN is going to increase the flexibility of platforms. One thing we’ve seen in the last few years is a strong desire for a single platform design to be easily reconfigured. So you may have an EW platform today, but you want to extend the capability to add some additional signal intelligence. It’s very easy to do that if everything is based around an Ethernet backbone. You don’t have to add additional I/O capabilities. The cabling, the look, the feel of the platforms is identical, you’re just adding additional protocols, application capability or reconfiguring what you’ve already got.

The other thing I think that it will really help with is this huge impetus in the western world to improve the responsiveness. How do we get equipment out to our warfighters quicker? The type of adversaries that we are facing, they’re quite often using off the shelf commercial equipment. They can bring new things to market quickly. They probably don’t last very long. They might not function very well; they have to have the ability to speed the time to market for some of these things.

And again, from our own company perspective, if I go around our software team here, I’m sure lots and lots of them will have the capability to program an Ethernet socket-based application. If I ask, well, how many of you have the capability to do that on 1553, I’m probably going to get a pretty small number of responses.

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