- Engineering & Technology
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The SN4I (Smart Networks for Industry) facility is a NFV and SDN aware communication network that interconnects the University of the Basque Country with the Aeronautics Advanced Manufacturing Centre. In this regard, NFV provides a flexible way to deploy virtual services, while SDN allows the programming of network elements in order to interconnect these virtual services by means of virtual links or virtual networks.
As a result, SN4I provides network, computing and storage slicing for the deployment of isolated concurrent services and experimentation. This deployment also allows to study the integration of NFV technologies with the Industrial Internet protocols and the coexistence with other networks like TSN (Time Sensitive Networks). Therefore, SN4I complements traditional research and activity in the AAMC field of manufacturing, with state of the art technologies like high bandwidth, low delay, on demand service creation, SDN based security, etc. The integration of all these technologies with cutting-edge machine tools and manufacturing processes allows to provide a mixed R+D+I centre in advanced connected manufacturing technologies that will become a reference at international level.
This infrastructure capitalizes the knowldege gathered in our previous facility, the University of the Basque Country's OpenFlow Enabled Facility (EHU-OEF) and represents the evolution of the application of SDN and NFV technologies to a vertical use case (Industry 4.0), but also to CiberSecurity and Generic Network Services deployment.
The infrastructure has 10Gbs (40Gbs capable) backbone supported by OpenFlow switches under the control of our DynPaC (SDN Based Bandwidth on Demand Service) which is configured as a WIM (Wide Area Manager, the first available in OSM (since v5.0.3.13))
The whole architecture is orchestrated by ETSI OSM Mano.
In rough numbers the whole setup includes around 14 OpenFlow switches (5 for the core, 7 for implementing SDN assist) and 2 for spare/experimentation, 4 OpenStack clusters around 20 servers which account for more than 1TB of RAM and 230 cores and equipment to stress, measure (bandwidth, delay, BER, setup time and TCP thoughput) and exercise the network.
The main building blocks of the infrastructure have been presented in some previous publications and papers.
A description of the facilty appeared in a Industrial Engineering Magazine, and because of that, the description is somewhat high-level. You can find the paper in Open Access (english version only) here: Towards a 5G compliant and flexible connected manufacturing facility
ETSIB de Bilbao (UPV / EHU), Alameda Urquijo s/n, 48013, Bilbao - Bizkaia
