Low latency and resilient industrial network with next generation SDN and PLC virtualization

The critical infrastructure and industrial control systems (ICS) typically function in isolation and make use of specialized hardware, software, protocols that are often sourced from heterogeneous vendors. Rise of Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) means that these isolated old networks are gradually being connected with Internet and other telecommunication networks. This leads to various problems and challenges, such as incompatibility with outside networks, cyber security challenges, limited automation, lack of features or mechanisms demanded by modern devices and sensors. On the other hand an ICS has strict operational requirements from the network, such as reliability, temporal consistency, ruggedness etc. Emerging technology like network function virtualization (NFV), and software defined network (SDN) have excellent opportunity to achieve network resiliency in ICS, however their application has been under-explored. Therefore, we present a novel architecture for industrial control networks (ICN) that take advantage of NFV and SDN to build robust, cost effective, secure, and scalable ICNs. We leverage the novel P4 paradigm to virtualize the network infrastructure and evaluate its effectiveness.