MC-SDN: Supporting Mixed-Criticality Real-Time Communication Using Software-Defined Networking

Despite recent advances, there still remain many problems to design reliable cyber-physical systems. One of the typical problems is to achieve a seemingly conflicting goal, which is to support timely delivery of real-time flows while improving resource efficiency. Recently, the concept of mixed-criticality (MC) has been widely accepted as useful in addressing the goal for real-time resource management. However, it has not been yet studied well for real-time communication. In this paper, we present the first approach to support MC flow scheduling on switched Ethernet networks leveraging an emerging network architecture, software-defined networking (SDN). Though SDN provides flexible and programmatic ways to control packet forwarding and scheduling, it yet raises several challenges to enable real-time MC flow scheduling on SDN, including: 1) how to handle (i.e., drop or re-prioritize) out-of-mode packets in the middle of the network when the criticality mode changes and 2) how the mode change affects end-to-end transmission delays. Addressing such challenges, we develop MC-SDN that supports real-time MC flow scheduling by extending SDN-enabled switches and OpenFlow protocols. It manages and schedules MC packets in different ways depending on the system criticality mode. To this end, we carefully design the mode change protocol that provides analytic mode change delay bound, and then resolve implementation issues for system architecture. For evaluation, we implement a prototype of MC-SDN on top of Open vSwitch, and integrate it into a real world network testbed as well as a 1/10 autonomous vehicle. Our extensive evaluations with the network testbed and vehicle deployment show that MC-SDN supports MC flow scheduling with minimal delays on forwarding rule updates and it brings a significant improvement in safety in a real-world application scenario.