Advancements in the field of Critical Infrastructures (CI), such as the advent of Smart Grids or automated transportation systems, offer new services and functionalities. However these novel Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) necessitate increasingly complex monitoring and control schemes, which are commonly orchestrated by industrial Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems. As thousands of distributed field devices are involved in the operation of Critical Infrastructures, the enabling communication technologies need to fulfil exacting performance requirements as well as provide high levels of robustness, Quality of Service, flexibility and scalability. The ongoing evolution of cellular LTE (Long Term Evolution) towards 5G networks promises to meet all these specifications. In this context Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is set to play a crucial part within the mobile network's wired backhaul as well as core infrastructures and is thus included in many proposed 5G architectures. However, basic performance characteristics allowing a comparison of the two prevalent approaches to SDN, fully virtualised and hardware based Bare-Metal switching, are currently not widely available. Therefore this paper proposes a test-platform for the benchmarking of SDN as well as a prototypical architecture. The latter serves to facilitate the evolutionary development of LTE towards 5G for use in Critical Infrastructure communication in general and Smart Grids in particular. A comparative evaluation of switching performance, realized via the described testbed, is presented and an assessment is given. Based on the introduced architecture and testbed, future work will develop new mechanisms for end-to-end slicing as well as application aware scheduling.
['Fabian Kurtz', 'Nils Dorsch', 'Christian Wietfeld']
Empirical comparison of virtualized and bare-metal switching for SDN-based 5G communication in critical infrastructures