Switchbox - Low-latency Fail-safe Assurance of Availability in Industrial Environments

The application of the latest trends to industrial networks under the vision of Industry 4.0 will bring among other things the introduction of middleboxes. These middleboxes will bring much flexibility and will be necessary to implement new use cases. Yet, they will also add additional points of failure to an industrial environment where safety and availability of services trump any other considerations. Therefore, we propose a solution that tries to balance the conflicting goals of deploying middleboxes into critical industrial environments while at the same time guaranteeing the availability of the communication path the middlebox sits on. We show, that our solution is highly performant, small in footprint and delivers a higher security level.