Towards a URLLC-Aware Programmable Data Path with P4 for Industrial 5G Networks

Having their own requirement and specifications, industrial networks mostly bank on traditionally more reliable wired technologies such as Ethernet and PROFINET. Recent developments in cellular technologies, more specifically 5G, bring a new era with ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) where networks can achieve six nines of reliability with latency values around 1 ms. Industries, thus, have a substantial interest in deploying 5G at factories as it can reduce both operational and capital costs while not compromising latency and reliability requirements. Unfortunately, today’s 5G networks are designed for the larger subscriber community in a city or country that has requirements significantly different from industrial networks. In this paper, we propose a novel programmable data path for industrial 5G networks in P4, a high-level programming language to control data plane in network devices, to achieve lower latency values while enabling network engineers to have a fine-grained real-time network monitoring and increasing network security using an in-network switch. Our design leverages the relaxations of operating industrial 5G networks compared to traditional multitenant cellular networks, such as the fact that a factory is both the network operator and user equipment (UE) operator. We implement our design in P4
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with P4’s software switch BMV2 and demonstrate its benefits on Open5GS, an open-source C-based 5G core implementation, and UERANSIM, an open-source 5G UE and RAN simulator. Our thorough evaluations show that our design can reduce intra-cellular network latency up to 2x compared to the traditional 5G architecture. We further demonstrate that our system can enable network administrators to do fine-grained network monitoring at the ~10 ms polling interval rates without significantly affecting the existing traffic. Similarly, we demonstrate that security rules can be updated within 10 ms with a 95% confidence interval. Noting that we run experiments on a P4-based software switch, we expect to see much lower update intervals on a P4-hardware switch.