Mr. Frick, four weeks ago you had your TSN Plugfest at the ISW in Stuttgart. How many participants did you have and what were your findings?

Florian Frick: We held our 21st Plugfest as a hybrid event and the 14 participants on site were only a fraction of the typical number of participants before the pandemic. Specifically, we were able to make great progress in setting up the next generation of our test infrastructure and conducting initial tests with it. This has shown the importance of face-to-face meetings. We have now created the basis for continuing to work efficiently on our core topic of interoperability and hopefully we will soon be able to move forward very efficiently in a larger group again. Our central topic of configuration will now also return to full focus.

What topics did you want to focus on at the trade fair?

Florian Frick, Group Leader 'Real-Time Communication' at ISW Stuttgart and Chair of the IIC TSN Testbed of the Industrial Internet Consortium: "Configuration is a key topic this year."

© University of Stuttgart

The most important messages of our planned presentation were certainly the cross-manufacturer character and interoperability of TSN. One key aspect that we wanted to emphasize was configuration. On the one hand, we would have presented the results achieved with regard to cross-manufacturer configuration. On the other hand, we also wanted to use the stand as a meeting point to discuss this topic, which is still in the standardization phase.

As far as our target group is concerned, we are currently making a shift: whereas in the past we still focused on technology-driving companies, we are increasingly concentrating on TSN users. We want to give this clientele in particular a good first-hand impression of the current state of affairs.

Where do you still see the biggest stumbling blocks on the way to putting TSN into practice?

While the TSN standards are still being worked on, it is already accepted across all industries as a key technology of the future and there are high hopes for its potential. TSN as a technology is only of secondary importance, the focus is on the associated ecosystem. That's why I see the biggest challenge in the near future as transforming existing technological solutions into a usable overall system! To make this vision a reality, we obviously still have to solve many practical, purely TSN-related problems, such as configuration.

What time horizon do you see for these tasks?

As a further development of Ethernet, TSN is part of a continuous process. That's why I prefer to talk about an evolution rather than a sudden revolution. A lot of things will be usable in the near future, but we will also see research and standardization activities for years to come.

However, 2022 is likely to be a very interesting year from several points of view: In 2022, further gaps will be closed on the part of the standards. In addition, the announcements made by practically all manufacturers give us hope that a wide range of products for infrastructure, endpoint solutions and software will be available in the near future. And finally, a lot can also be expected from the application side: the expected results of the FLC initiative are certainly of particular importance here.