The increasing demand for deterministic network transmission in industrial applications, including autonomous driving, automation, and healthcare necessitates highly reliable, time-sensitive data exchanges. In order to meet these needs, the IEEE 802.1 working group's Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards ensure predictable communication with bounded latency and minimal delay variation on Ethernet networks. The TSN standard IEEE 802.1Qbv defines Time-Aware Shaping (TAS) as a mechanism enabling bridges and end stations to transmit frames of different priorities according to specified time schedules. A current area of research is the development of adaptive scheduling algorithms for TAS that can react to varying requirements and topology changes. These algorithms aim to generate synchronized schedules for all bridges within the network during runtime. Typically, these scheduling algorithms are executed on a Centralized Network Controller (CNC). One common method that the CNC may use to implement schedules on the bridges is through the Network Configuration Protocol (NETCONF).

In this work, we present the design and implementation of an extensible NETCONF server interface for TSN bridges, which are simulated within an OMNeT++/INET simulation environment. The primary focus of our implementation is on the reconfiguration of TAS during runtime. We provide two distinct server backends for handling the NETCONF messages. Moreover, we design an additional dummy CNC module to provide a transparent interface to an external CNC, which is not part of the simulation. In order to facilitate communication between the dummy CNC and the external CNC, we implement an additional external component, designated as the CNC bridge server. Furthermore, we extend the NETCONF server interface with a basic Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) implementation, thereby enabling the external CNC to construct a global network topology.

To validate our approach, we reconfigure TAS and request LLDP data of a simulated TSN bridge from an external CNC during runtime. Subsequently, we employ the result analysis feature of OMNeT++ to confirm the successful implementation of the changes. Our evaluation confirms the successful implementation of the new schedule at the desired point in time. Furthermore, we can confirm, that the retrieved LLDP data contains the requisite information for the computation of a global network topology.