  Robust, reliable, and deterministic networks are essential for a variety of
applications. In order to provide guaranteed communication network services,
Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) unites a set of standards for
time-synchronization, flow control, enhanced reliability, and management. We
design the TSN-FlexTest testbed with generic commodity hardware and open-source
software components to enable flexible TSN measurements. We have conducted
extensive measurements to validate the TSN-FlexTest testbed and to examine TSN
characteristics. The measurements provide insights into the effects of TSN
configurations, such as increasing the number of synchronization messages for
the Precision Time Protocol, indicating that a measurement accuracy of 15 ns
can be achieved. The TSN measurements included extensive evaluations of the
Time-aware Shaper (TAS) for sets of Tactile Internet (TI) packet traffic
streams. The measurements elucidate the effects of different scheduling and
shaping approaches, while revealing the need for pervasive network control that
synchronizes the sending nodes with the network switches. We present the first
measurements of distributed TAS with synchronized senders on a commodity
hardware testbed, demonstrating the same Quality-of-Service as with dedicated
wires for high-priority TI streams despite a 200% over-saturation cross traffic
load. The testbed is provided as an open-source project to facilitate future
TSN research.
