Ethernet Communication over IP Transport for Industrial and Private Cellular Network

Current industrial networks and protocols heavily rely on Ethernet connectivity and in some cases TCP/IP is only used for Ethernet station discovery while all further communication takes place using native Ethernet. One example of such industrial Ethernet protocol is Profinet and its low latency variant Profinet RT. However, in a cellular network such as Long Term Evolution (LTE) network, a UE is only provided an IP address by the System Architecture Evolution Gateway (SAEGW). This IP only connection is called bearer in LTE, does not natively enable Ethernet communication which is required to enable industrial Ethernet communication over cellular networks. To enable Ethernet communication over any IP transport, our paper introduces a solution to transport the message from UE to Ethernet Host without using encapsulating original Ethernet frames as such. It simplifies network configuration and maintenance by eliminating active signaling protocols and static configurations (tunnels) and results in less overhead for transporting the Ethernet frames and maintaining the infrastructure. This would directly benefit industrial connectors as the operational overhead of manual GRE tunnel management could be eliminated.