Dynamic Deterministic Digital Infrastructure for Time-Sensitive Applications in Factory Floors

By massively digitalizing production processes, the industry expects an efficient and secure cooperation of a large number of machines, as well as an increasing integration of IT-systems for control and services, for instance using edge clouds. Their vision calls for a distributed, converged datacom and telecom infrastructure where performance, can be deterministic per application, i.e. strictly guaranteed, end-to-end, across technologies and across layers. Its success will largely depend on how dynamically it can reuse resources and how cost-effectively it can host mainstream best-effort applications. In this paper, we review the key performance indicators for such an infrastructure while confronting them to thirty use cases reported by the industry. We then examine the requirements for the digital infrastructure. We benchmark them against the capabilities of relevant network technologies, while pointing to meaningful enhancements. We particularly discuss Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), a set of standards extending IEEE 802.1 Ethernet with some deterministic functions, which is considered to be the most promising enabling technology for future industrial networks. We propose to augment its scalability with a novel optical backbone which can interconnect islands of TSN networks while preserving timing.