Network Slicing in Industry 4.0 Applications: Abstraction Methods and End-to-End Analysis

Industry 4.0 introduces modern communication and computation technologies such as cloud computing and Internet of Things to industrial manufacturing systems. As a result, many devices, machines and applications will rely on connectivity, while having different requirements to the network, ranging from high reliability and low latency to high data rates. Furthermore, these industrial networks will be highly heterogeneous as they will feature a number of diverse communication technologies. Current technologies are not well suited for this scenario, which requires that the network is managed at an abstraction level which is decoupled from the underlying technologies. In this paper, we consider network slicing as a mechanism to handle these challenges. We present methods for slicing deterministic and packet-switched industrial communication protocols which simplifies the manageability of heterogeneous networks with various application requirements. Furthermore, we show how to use network calculus to assess the end-to-end properties of the network slices.