Performance isolation for network slices in Industry 4.0: The 5Growth approach

Abstract

Network slicing plays a key role in the 5G ecosystem for verticals to introduce new use cases in the industrial sector, i.e., Industry 4.0. However, a widely recognized challenge of network slicing is to provide traffic isolation and concurrently satisfy diverse performance requirements, e.g., bandwidth and latency. Such challenge becomes even more important when serving a large number of network traffic flows under a resource-limited condition between distributed sites, e.g., factory floor and remote office. In this work, we present the capability to retain these two goals at the same time, by applying the virtual queue notion over a priority queuing based pipeline in P4 switch over software-defined networks. To examine the effectiveness of our approach, a proof-of-concept is setup to serve different requests of Industry 4.0 use cases over a mixed data path, including P4 switch and Open vSwitch, for a large number of network flows.