A Real-Time Software Defined Networking Framework for Next-Generation Industrial Networks

Moutinho, Luis; Pedreiras, Paulo; Almeida, Luis

http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/15282

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Authors

Moutinho, Luis

Pedreiras, Paulo

Almeida, Luis

Abstract(s)

Industry 4.0 brings in a whole set of new requirements to engineering industrial systems, with notorious impact at the networking layer. A key challenge posed by Industry 4.0 is the operational flexibility needed to support on-the-fly reconfiguration of production cells, stations, and machines. At the networking layer, this flexibility implies dynamic packet handling, scheduling, and dispatching. SoftwareDefined Networking (SDN) provides this level of flexibility in the general Local Area Network (LAN) domain. However, its application in the industry has been hindered by a lack of support for real-time services. This paper addresses this limitation, proposing an extended SDN OpenFlow framework that includes realtime services, leveraging existing real-time data plane Ethernet technologies. We show the OpenFlow enhancements, a real-time SDN controller, and experimental validation and performance assessment. Using a proof-of-concept prototype with 3 switches and cycles of 250µs, we could achieve 1µs jitter on timetriggered traffic and a reconfiguration time between operational modes below 10ms