SDN-based Differentiated Traffic Flow Management for Industrial Internet of Things Environments

Today Industrial IoT environments are still based on traditional IP technologies, which makes difficult, if not impossible, to bridge the missing link between the application and the network layer. Indeed, IIoT applications should be able to ask for network services (with specific QoS guarantees) independently of the addressing at the network and transport layer. In this paper, we start from a novel patented method for routing packets to demonstrate with a prototype implementation the feasibility and efficiency of a software defined solution based on flow tagging with the purpose of supporting IIoT dynamic network programmability. We show how the combination of IP datagram options and SDN allows IIoT environments to reach per-device and per-application flow management granularity. The presented proof of concept prototype outlines the capability to dynamically program the network based on tagged flows and to differentiate network behaviors based on IIoT requirements together with the whole network state.