On the adequacy of SDN and TSN for Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0, Industrial Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Production Systems and Smart Factories are closely related emerging concepts expected to drive significant improvements in industrial production systems, with gains in efficiency, cost and customer satisfaction. These concepts are intimately associated with highly distributed and cooperative architectures that rely, naturally, on the network infrastructure. However, traditional industrial communication technologies hardly provide the required level of integration, flexibility and performance. Seeking a solution to this mismatch, we assess two technologies that appeared recently in the industrial realm, namely IEEE 802.1 Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN). TSN and SDN are fundamentally different, thus having distinct strengths and weaknesses. This paper reviews their fundamental operation principles, evaluating them qualitatively against the specific requirements posed by Industry 4.0.