Supporting consumer services in a deterministic industrial internet core network

Abstract

A convergence is occurring in the networking world. Industrial networks currently provide deterministic services in robotic factories and aircraft, while the best effort Internet of Things provides best effort services for consumers. We argue that a convergence should occur, and that a future converged Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) should support both best effort and deterministic services, with very low latency and jitter. This article presents the design of a deterministic IIoT core network consisting of many simple deterministic packet switches configured by an SDN control plane. The use of deterministic communications can reduce router buffer sizes by a factor of ≥ 1000, and can reduce end-to-end latencies to the speed of light in fiber. A speed-of-light deterministic core network can have a profound impact on virtually all consumer services such as multimedia distribution, e-Commerce, and cloud computing or gaming systems. Highly aggregated video streams can be delivered over a deterministic virtual network with very high link utilization (≤ 100 percent), very low packet jitter (≤ 10 μs), and zero congestion. In addition to improving consumer services, a converged deterministic IIoT core network can save billions of dollars per year as a result of significantly improved network utilization and energy efficiency.