A flexible, deterministic and highly reliable end-to-end communication network for industrial automation systems.

The convergence of information and communications technology (ICT) and operation technology (OT) into a common infrastructure for factory floors, is one of the key enablers for Industry 4.0. Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) is being developed for that purpose. It extends the Ethernet standard (IEEE 802.1) with real-time capabilities. Only TSN scheduled gated (Qbv) can isolate time-critical flows among themselves but requires global synchronization and schedule. We considerably alleviate these limitations by proposing a new architecture that partitions the schedule. We create a hierarchy with an optical backbone (Industrial Optical Ethernet-IOE) for a converged industrial network with a specific new frame layer. The backbone tunnels the traffic of multiple independent TSN networks together along with possibly heavy 5G and IT traffic. Furthermore, the radio access segment of the converged network needs to be prepared accordingly to meet the high demands of the control and management system. We demonstrate the support of multiple independent domains over the optical backbone and the support of a new traffic class commonly known as Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communications (URLLC) using various measures to ensure high reliability (e.g. sophisticated retransmission techniques, multi-connectivity, receive diversity) for the 5G radio transmission. We create a hierarchy with an optical backbone for a converged industrial network with a specific new frame layer. The backbone can tunnel the traffic of multiple independent TSN networks together along with possibly heavy 5G and IT traffic. It supports multiple 5G/TSN networks each with independent time/scheduling domains while removing the need for synchronization among logically unrelated devices, irrespective of their locality. Moreover, 5G use cases like ultra-reliable low-latency communication (URLLC) and massive machine type communication (mMTC) can be independently transported in parallel. As a second breakthrough innovation the radio access part of the PoC includes various enablers for making URLLC a reality