In this dataset, a TSN patent is a filing whose title or claims reference time-sensitive networking, TSN Ethernet or deterministic Ethernet, combined with claim-description language covering time synchronization, traffic shaping, bounded latency, stream reservation or industrial convergence. The search is further scoped to IPC codes H04L12, H04J3 and H04L47, which cover digital transmission, multiplex communication and packet-switching congestion control respectively. That combination captures core deterministic-networking mechanisms rather than every patent that merely mentions TSN in passing.

By citation count within this corpus, the leading record is a control-plane configuration patent for time-sensitive networking with 67 citations, roughly double the next-ranked filing. A related PCT filing on the same control-plane concept and an Ethernet controller patent integrating TSN and AVB control points round out the top tier. High citation counts reflect influence on later filings within the searched set, not necessarily current commercial deployment, since older records accumulate citations simply by being available longer.

No — filing peaked at 25 families in 2020 and has trended down since, sitting at 18 by the 2022 midpoint. That said, publication typically lags filing by around 18 months, so the most recent one to two years in any trend chart will always look lower than the true filing rate turns out to be once those applications finish publishing. The honest read is that the foundational claim space looks fully staked, but it is too early to call the field closed.

The IPC composition shows H04L, H04W and H04J carrying the bulk of filings (87, 38 and 27 records respectively), while G06F, G11B, H01L, H03M and H04N each appear in only a handful of records. That imbalance points to relatively open ground in areas like semiconductor-level TSN timestamp hardware, storage-bridge clock synchronization, and coding schemes tailored to bounded-latency error correction — none of which show the dense filing history of the core transmission and wireless claims.

Joint filing across separate organisations is uncommon in this dataset. The strongest co-assignee relationship links two related Airbus filing entities across four shared families, which is the densest collaboration signal found. Outside that pairing, most records trace to a single corporate assignee, suggesting that TSN claim-writing — even where standards work is collaborative — tends to happen inside one company's patent portfolio rather than through joint applications.