Integrated Industrial Ethernet Networks: Time-sensitive Networking over SDN Infrastructure for mixed Applications

A unified network architecture, allowing for simultaneous transmission of multiple real-time (RT) and non-RT traffic classes, is becoming increasingly important for the realization of industrial IoT. There is yet no clear approach allowing multiple state-of-the-art Industrial Ethernet applications, exhibiting different isochronous hard real-time traffic patterns, to share the same network resources alongside best-effort traffic. This paper presents an approach to integrating heterogeneous Industrial Ethernet applications over Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN). We deploy different real-time schedulers that are embedded in a Software-defined Network (SDN) controller to allow different applications with various traffic patterns and Qualityof-Service (QoS) requirements to share the same network. This integration is accomplished by providing an abstraction that combines the requirements of the Industrial Ethernet application and the TSN network capabilities and constraints.