TEG Report: Network Communication – Sino-German TSN Cooperation

Background

As part of the Sino-German standardization cooperation on Industrie 4.0 / Intelligent Manufacturing, the Technical Expert Group Network Communication (TEG NetCom) drives collaboration between the German Labs Network Industrie 4.0 (LNI 4.0) and the Chinese Alliance of Industrial Internet (AII). The focus areas are Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), Wireless Industrial Application, and increasingly wire-line communications as well.

 

Study Item: Large Scale TSN Networks

• China: TSN technology is increasingly being deployed in factories, but large-scale network operation brings significant challenges — inconsistent protocol subsets across vendors, clock synchronization issues over multiple hops, traffic scheduling conflicts, and high complexity in configuration and fault diagnosis. China operates a growing TSN test bed with commercial switches and controllers to address these issues.
• Germany: The LNI 4.0 test bed (established in 2017) is strongly geared toward SME use cases; large-scale networks are not yet a core focus but the collaboration supports future alignment on the topic.
• Joint direction: Both countries see production-line use cases (machines from different vendors within one TSN network) as the key driver and aim to align requirements on a global scale.

 

Study Item: LRP RAP (Resource Allocation Protocol)

• China: There are currently no specialized institutions researching RAP at the protocol level; efforts focus more on link discovery and resource reservation. China offers to collaborate with Germany on developing a validation prototype.
• Germany: Through more than 20 international plugfests, LNI 4.0 has actively contributed to IEEE 802.1Qdd (now 802.1DD), including work on Resource Allocation Classes, redundancy (FRER/VLAN), and time synchronization (802.1AS).
• Development: The PAR for 802.1Qdd was withdrawn in 2024; the work now continues as the standalone project IEEE P802.1DD (current draft: 1.5, April 2026), which achieved full MSRP compatibility.

 

Outlook

China and Germany intend to feed these results into IEEE and IEC standardization bodies (e.g., IEEE 802.1DD, 802.1AS) and continue joint verification work. Further study items and use cases are planned.