Towards 5G-Enabled Operational Technology for Process Monitoring and Network Slicing

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are deployed to monitor physical processes in critical cyber-enabled services like power generation. However, CPS ecosystems are typically designed without robust security. While it is important to ensure optimal performance of the Operational Technology (OT) environments, security cannot be overlooked. To modernize traditional OT services, 5G technology is being integrated. 5G technology offers low latency and high availability, making it a suitable infrastructure for managing and monitoring physical processes. How-ever, integrating 5G mechanisms into large-scale OT networks introduces new implementation and performance challenges. Therefore, this paper presents a 5G-enabled CPS architecture (5G-CPS) that describes the necessary components, services, and communication protocols and conducts feasibility study to integrate 5G technology in industrial control system networks to understand the performance merits. The 5G-CPS architecture aims to minimize implementation and operational challenges associated with integrating 5G technology into constrained OT.

I. Introduction

Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are responsible for supporting critical cyber-enabled services such as power generation. However, traditional CPS ecosystems are made up of legacy Operational Technology (OT) devices that lack robust security to ensure the authenticity and integrity of physical processes. Adversaries can exploit the lack of security to disrupt OT de-vices through data breaches and rogue runtime-system-states. Given the recent growth of cyber attacks, the modernization of CPS architectures is necessary to adopt more flexible and resilient communication technology. Next-generation network management and system process monitoring services are suit-able to provide dynamic frameworks that can be adapted to heterogeneous OT devices and industrial communication protocols however next-generation communication technology needs to comply with the operational requirements and real-time data needed of for traditional CPS ecosystems.