Software-Defined Networking driven Time-Sensitive Networking for Mixed-Criticality Control Applications

Developments such as Industry 4.0, Smart Grids, or Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) depend on reliable high-performance communications to enable the underlying control algorithms. Nevertheless, in most cases it is not viable to provide network infrastructures exclusively for mission-critical control traffic or just the general use case. Hence, 5G as well as future 6G networks entail functionalities such as network slicing to enable the coexistence of mixed-criticality applications on unified networks. An approach capable of supporting slicing in the wireline domain is Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). It addresses the mentioned challenges by enhancing the Ethernet standard with functionalities required for deterministically bounded low latencies and preemption of high priority data flows. To facilitate its integration with existing 5G and emerging architectures including 6G and open Radio Access Networks (O-RANs), Software-Defined Networking (SDN) has emerged for orchestrating the novel feature set. In this paper, we thus combine TSN and SDN to design an integrated solution. We present experimental results on handling communication-demanding control algorithms and cross traffic simultaneously. Our findings underpin the potential of SDN-driven TSN for mixed-criticality control applications.