Real-time wireless data plane for real-time-enabled SDN

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is a new paradigm for engineering industrial systems, relying on Information and Communication Technologies to support dynamic operation, interoperability and heterogeneity across the whole industrial architecture. In turn, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a well-suited paradigm for dynamic communications management, being the Open-Flow protocol its most common implementation. Recently, the METRICS project addressed extending OpenFlow with real-time reservations (RTOF), filling a gap that limited SDN use in industry. However, until now RTOF was supported on real-time Ethernet data planes, only. Following the growing interest on wireless communication within Industry 4.0, this work-in-progress paper presents a real-time data plane for RTOF, building on IEEE 802.11e Quality-of-Service features and on Linux TC reservations capacity. We present the data plane architecture and preliminary experiments that show encouraging results.