Dynamic Deterministic Digital Infrastructure for Time-Sensitive Applications in Factory Floors

While massively digitizing production processes, industries expect efficient and secure cooperation of a large number of machines, as well as programmable operation from edge clouds. Their vision calls for a distributed, converged datacom and telecom infrastructure where performance can be deterministic per application, i.e. strictly guaranteed, end-to-end, across technologies and across layers. Its success will largely depend on how dynamically it can reuse resources and how cost-effectively it can host mainstream best-effort applications. In this paper, we review the key performance indicators for such an infrastructure while confronting them to four dozen use cases reported by industries. We then examine the requirements for the digital infrastructure. We benchmark them the promises of candidate network technologies, while pointing to meaningful enhancements. We particularly discuss ITU 802.1Qbu time-sensitive networks (TSN) as some of the most promising platforms for future industrial networks. We propose to augment their scalability with a novel optical backbone which can interconnect islands of TSN devices while preserving timing.