Abstract: Time-sensitive networking flow scheduling algorithms often generate a large number of gate control events, exceeding the capabilities of network devices and making it difficult to deploy sche- duling algorithms in practical networks. To address this issue, a novel flexible gate control-based flow scheduling strategy is proposed, which relaxes the strict isolation constraints between real-time traffic flows and best-effort traffic flows, allowing some nodes to not enable the gate control mechanism for real-time flows. This strategy can flexibly select to enable the gate control for real-time business at various network device ports, reducing the gate control events required for scheduling real-time traffic flows by up to 91.6%. It even allows the existence of network devices on the transmission path of real-time traffic that do not support gate control scheduling, achieving a mixed deployment with ordinary networks. 

Key words: time-sensitive networking, deterministic network transmission, flow scheduling, flexible gate control, gate control list