Enabling Multi-Tenant Networks for the Automation Industry

Future industrial networks are expected to not only provide a rich environment of very different devices, but also will host a multitude of applications operated and managed by different parties, the so-called tenants. Isolation of tenants is essential for a stable and secure operation of a factory. Application upgrades and novel software enable faster innovation cycles. Secure remote management allows more outsourcing to third parties but leads to continuously changing factory networks. Mobile or even autonomous devices again add complexity. However, current factory owners are conservative for good reasons: changing a well-designed system is costly and may cause failures and outages of the production lines. The virtual tenant network (VTN) concept addresses this conflict by means of combining network virtualization, hardware virtualization, cloud technologies and IT automation. Thus, tenants are isolated and configuration changes or security breaches in one tenant will not affect others. The concept at hand borrows from data center technology but adopts those ideas to the embedded world of industrial networks.