Modeling and Profiling of Aggregated Industrial Network Traffic

Mehrzad Lavassani,Johan Åkerberg,Mats Björkman

doi:10.3390/app12020667

Mehrzad Lavassani, Johan Åkerberg + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/app12020667

Copy DOI

Abstract

The industrial network infrastructures are transforming to a horizontal architecture to enable data availability for advanced applications and enhance flexibility for integrating new technologies. The uninterrupted operation of the legacy systems needs to be ensured by safeguarding their requirements in network configuration and resource management. Network traffic modeling is essential in understanding the ongoing communication for resource estimation and configuration management. The presented work proposes a two-step approach for modeling aggregated traffic classes of brownfield installation. It first detects the repeated work-cycles and then aims to identify the operational states to profile their characteristics. The performance and influence of the approach are evaluated and validated in two experimental setups with data collected from an industrial plant in operation. The comparative results show that the proposed method successfully captures the temporal and spatial dynamics of the network traffic for characterization of various communication states in the operational work-cycles.

Highlights

The concept of Industrial IoT encompasses the joint applicability of operation, internet, and information technologies to expand the efficiency expectation of automation to green and flexible processes with innovative products and services
The experiments of this study cover a part of the operational network consisting of 5 control systems, with 43 stations connected to the server network and 32 process controllers on various virtual LANs (VLANs); 337 devices in total [3,10]
A two-step approach was proposed for modeling aggregated traffic classes of brownfield, and identifying various communication states to profile their characteristics with a network-level perspective

Summary

Introduction

The concept of Industrial IoT encompasses the joint applicability of operation, internet, and information technologies to expand the efficiency expectation of automation to green and flexible processes with innovative products and services. A requirement for ensuing this integration is the transformation of industrial network infrastructures to enable the accommodation of new traffic from different technologies. This transformation is step-wise and needs many considerations to ensure the successful development of future industrial networks. One dominant challenge for industrial networks to overcome is satisfying the diverse and, in some cases, contradictory requirements of the Internet technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) systems, like real-time performance and high throughput. Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) [4] provides a toolbox to provide mechanisms for any possible traffic type that are predicted to coexist in the future industrial networks

Results

Discussion

Conclusion