IEEE Access (Jan 2019)

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

  • Luis Moutinho,
  • Paulo Pedreiras,
  • Luis Almeida

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2952242
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 7
pp. 164468 – 164479

Abstract

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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.

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