  Owning to the sub-standards being developed by IEEE Time-Sensitive Networking
(TSN) Task Group, the traditional IEEE 802.1 Ethernet is enhanced to support
real-time dependable communications for future time- and safety-critical
applications. Several sub-standards have been recently proposed that introduce
various traffic shapers (e.g., Time-Aware Shaper (TAS), Asynchronous Traffic
Shaper (ATS), Credit-Based Shaper (CBS), Strict Priority (SP)) for flow control
mechanisms of queuing and scheduling, targeting different application
requirements. These shapers can be used in isolation or in combination and
there is limited work that analyzes, evaluates and compares their performance,
which makes it challenging for end-users to choose the right combination for
their applications. This paper aims at (i) quantitatively comparing various
traffic shapers and their combinations, (ii) summarizing, classifying and
extending the architectures of individual and combined traffic shapers and
their Network calculus (NC)-based performance analysis methods and (iii)
filling the gap in the timing analysis research on handling two novel hybrid
architectures of combined traffic shapers, i.e., TAS+ATS+SP and TAS+ATS+CBS. A
large number of experiments, using both synthetic and realistic test cases, are
carried out for quantitative performance comparisons of various individual and
combined traffic shapers, from the perspective of upper bounds of delay,
backlog and jitter. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to
quantitatively compare the performance of the main traffic shapers in TSN. The
paper aims at supporting the researchers and practitioners in the selection of
suitable TSN sub-protocols for their use cases.
