Towards a 5G compliant and flexible connected manufacturing facility

Abstract

 The incoming smart Industry 4.0 envisions fully interconnected 
scenarios to boost the efficiency, quality and performance 
of industrial processes. In this context, communication 
technologies play a pivotal role as the key tool that enables 
the interconnection among a priori isolated business 
processes, making the most of them and resulting in more 
powerful business-level applications and decision-making. In 
this paper, we present the application of two cutting-edge 
telecommunication technologies, namely, network function 
virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN), to 
the manufacturing industry, showing how these technologies can 
help improve manufacturing processes. We introduce the SN4I 
(Smart Networks for Industry) experimental facility, which is an 
NFV- and SDN-aware communication network that connects the 
University of the Basque Country with the Aeronautics Advanced 
Manufacturing Centre. In this regard, NFV provides a flexible way 
to deploy virtual services, while SDN allows the programming 
of network elements to interconnect these virtual services by 
means of virtual links or virtual networks. Both technologies 
guarantee full data and performance level isolation, ensuring 
that virtual services running over the same physical hardware 
or virtual links deployed over the same physical network will 
never interfere with one another. With the integration of NFV 
and SDN in manufacturing networks, the design, evaluation and 
deployment time of services that include computational, storage 
and networking resources is drastically decreased, facilitating 
innovation and optimizing network and hardware resource 
utilization.