Real-time QoS Routing Scheme in SDN-based Robotic Cyber-Physical Systems
This addresses the need for efficient communication in industrial networks with expensive robotic components, though it appears incremental by building on existing SDN capabilities.
The paper tackles the problem of improving Quality-of-Service (QoS) in robotic cyber-physical systems with hard real-time requirements by proposing an SDN-based routing mechanism that dynamically selects paths based on current link parameters. The result shows it significantly outperforms an existing delay-based routing mechanism in terms of average throughput, end-to-end delay, and jitter, as verified on a realistic industrial OpenFlow topology.
Industrial cyber-physical systems (CPS) have gained enormous attention of manufacturers in recent years due to their automation and cost reduction capabilities in the fourth industrial revolution (Industry 4.0). Such an industrial network of connected cyber and physical components may consist of highly expensive components such as robots. In order to provide efficient communication in such a network, it is imperative to improve the Quality-of-Service (QoS). Software Defined Networking (SDN) has become a key technology in realizing QoS concepts in a dynamic fashion by allowing a centralized controller to program each flow with a unified interface. However, state-of-the-art solutions do not effectively use the centralized visibility of SDN to fulfill QoS requirements of such industrial networks. In this paper, we propose an SDN-based routing mechanism which attempts to improve QoS in robotic cyber-physical systems which have hard real-time requirements. We exploit the SDN capabilities to dynamically select paths based on current link parameters in order to improve the QoS in such delay-constrained networks. We verify the efficiency of the proposed approach on a realistic industrial OpenFlow topology. Our experiments reveal that the proposed approach significantly outperforms an existing delay-based routing mechanism in terms of average throughput, end-to-end delay and jitter. The proposed solution would prove to be significant for the industrial applications in robotic cyber-physical systems.