A Proposal Towards Software-Defined Management of Heterogeneous Virtualized Industrial Networks

Future industrial networks are envisioned to support a broad set of applications and services with diverse communication requirements that are difficult to meet adopting a single communication technology. Software-Defined Networking and network virtualization techniques represent two promising innovations and abstractions to improve the network management and to support scalable network control functions, flexible resource allocation, and changes in the network traffic. This paper draws a research direction towards software-defined management of heterogeneous Industry 4.0 communication networks, proposing a software-defined architecture that is able to support a multitude of diverse wired and wireless communication technologies, while meeting the requirements of diverse applications. The paper also provides an implementation roadmap, discussing how to extend the EmPOWER framework to fulfill the intended target, pointing at design challenges and solutions.