Mohammadpour, EhsanLe Boudec, Jean-Yves2022-03-282022-03-282022-03-282022-02-2810.1109/TNET.2022.3152178https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/186600WOS:000764879600001Dampers are devices that reduce delay jitter in the context of time-sensitive networks, by delaying packets for the amount written in packet headers. Jitter reduction is required by some real-time applications; beyond this, dampers have the potential to solve the burstiness cascade problem of deterministic networks in a scalable way, as they can be stateless. Dampers exist in several variants: some apply only to earliest-deadline-first schedulers, whereas others can be associated with any packet schedulers; some enforce FIFO ordering whereas some others do not. Existing analyses of dampers are specific to some implementations and some network configurations; also, they assume ideal, non-realistic clocks. In this paper, we provide a taxonomy of all existing dampers in general network settings and analyze their timing properties in presence of non-ideal clocks. In particular, we give formulas for computing residual jitter bounds of networks with dampers of any kind. We show that non-FIFO dampers may cause reordering due to clock non-idealities and that the combination of FIFO dampers with non-FIFO network elements may very negatively affect the performance bounds. Our results can be used to analyze timing properties and burstiness increase in any time-sensitive network, as we illustrate on an industrial case-study.Computer Science, Hardware & ArchitectureComputer Science, Theory & MethodsEngineering, Electrical & ElectronicTelecommunicationsComputer ScienceEngineeringshock absorbersdelaysjitterclocksqueueing analysissynchronizationtaxonomydampertime-sensitive networkburstiness cascadenon-ideal clocksnetwork calculustext::journal::journal article::research article