Where is Time-Sensitive Networking Headed in 2026?

Time‑sensitive networking (TSN) will continue to see adoption in factories worldwide, building on the existing deployments already seen in over 100 companies globally. Three key forces will drive this: maturation of the standardization landscape; increased vendor implementations; and silicon, tools and test programs that increase development options for vendors.

Standardization activities should be completed in 2026. While the general TSN “toolbox” of IEEE 802.1 standards has been complete for some time, further standardization work for industrial automation is continuing and is expected to be completed this year. This divides into two areas as follows:

• The IEC/IEEE 60802 standardized TSN profiles for industrial automation should be completed. This is expected to give TSN a further boost and encourage more end users to support it by increasing confidence in multi-vendor systems.
• TIACC (TSN Industrial Automation Conformance Collaboration) standardized testing activity is expected to deliver a standardized testing capability for TSN in 2026. This will provide further encouragement to vendors to increase the number of products available, since testing will become standardized across different vendors and network organizations.

Across the open industrial Ethernet community, we should see further progress. Some organizations like the CC-Link Partner Association (CLPA) has offered a TSN-compatible industrial Ethernet technology, CC-Link IE TSN, for some time. This has led to strong support in the vendor community, with key global players like Mitsubishi Electric offering a comprehensive portfolio of compatible products. They’re being joined by other vendors to provide a full solution for many different applications.

2026 may also see the CLPA joined by PROFINET and PROFIBUS International (PI) introducing “PROFINET over TSN” (Conformance Class D). This has been shown with prototype devices for some time. Combined with the TIACC and IEC/IEEE 60802 activities mentioned earlier, it will help to ensure that TSN becomes further established in the industrial automation market.

Moreover, the OPC Foundation’s Field Level Communications (FLC) is now close to maturity and expected to support TSN. Other organizations like the ISW at the University of Stuttgart have been running regular TSN plugfests to help vendors further develop their solutions.

Of course, the foundation for all of these activities is development platforms and tools. Many major vendors such as NXP and Renesas already offer various ways to implement TSN in real-world products, and 2026 should see them joined by other leading vendors to further broaden development possibilities. One step further from this, we can see strong support from infrastructure vendors such as Moxa and Phoenix Contact to offer TSN-compatible switches and associated hardware.

What Does This Mean for End Users of TSN?

For organizations planning upgrades in 2026, TSN is deployable with confidence in actual production systems, not just as an experiment. More companies will see the benefit of converged networks in their systems, with multiple kinds of traffic sharing the same network, reducing costs, and improving system capabilities.