An SDN architecture for time sensitive industrial IoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IoT) applications have diverse network session requirements. Certain critical applications, such as emergency alert relay, industrial floor evacuation, and surveillance systems, require fresh updates that can maintain the most recently delivered packets. This requires high reconfigurability to an extent where the system can measure the impact of an event and adapt the network accordingly. Several approaches have been proposed that provide high precision transmission and bounded latencies. One prominent solution strategy in the literature is based on Software Defined Networking (SDN) control to resolve latency-related issues, such as congestion, for factory floor transmissions. The OpenFlow protocol is a key interface used in SDN to create a low-latency environment. However, the existing approaches provide only offline solutions that are typically compute intensive. Therefore, this article proposes an algorithm based on simple online strategies that utilize an SDN controller with a global view of the network. More specifically, within the context of the IEEE Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) standards this article: (1) designs a control policy framework called TSN_u that guarantees transmission time-slot allocations for Scheduled Traffic while mitigating network congestion, (2) develops a utility maximization approach to jointly optimize scheduling, routing, and admission control while ensuring network stability and maximizing the flow admission to the network, and (3) presents extensive theoretical analysis and simulation to evaluate the proposed TSN_u design. The conducted evaluations indicate substantially improved performance compared with state-of-the-art policies.