An SDN-based solution for increasing flexibility and reliability of dedicated network environments

To pave the way towards using adapted wide scale telco technologies within dedicated networks environment, there is a dire need to increase the reliability of the end-to-end communication beyond what is currently offered to individual subscribers towards the levels previously available in operations technology. This can be achieved by adding a new dynamic Software Defined Networks (SDN) routing overlay on top of the existing point-to-point forwarding technologies. This article introduces an SDN-based solution for dedicated industrial environments, aiming at providing a new level of flexibility and adaptability in case of network or service failure. A gap analysis of the existing infrastructures gives the basis for the network evolution, especially addressing the control of the routing within the given deployment. Furthermore, a new set of functional features are proposed to be added to the existing wired and to the emerging wireless infrastructure in order to further increase the network flexibility and reliability from network availability and optimal data paths perspective. The different features are then exemplified as existing and further to be implemented extensions of the Fraunhofer FOKUS OpenSDNCore toolkit, assessing the effectiveness of the approach for different deployments and use cases.