Deterministic Local Cloud for Industrial Applications

Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) is a key enabler technology for Industry 4.0. TSN provides the basic building block for network convergence: instead of having multiple, parallel communication networks for each traffic type in the factory, it provides a common ground that can fulfill the Quality-of-Service requirements of all existing networks with a single, shared infrastructure. The next step on this path is the convergence of the computing infrastructure, where on-premises cloud technology will be used to aggregate the different process controllers into a cloud computing environment. In this paper, we highlight some of the challenges in the cloudification of TSN traffic endpoints, and present an architecture design for TSN and cloud integration. We have set up a testbed and carried out measurements to show how the requirements of an industrial network can be met with cloudified TSN functions.