A Framework for QoS- Enabled Semantic Routing in Industrial Networks: Overall Architecture and Primary Protocols

The manufacturing sector represents a notable use case of the Industry 4.0 revolution, heavily stressing the capability of plants to ensure the desired QoS. Currently, manufacturing plants are characterized by an increasing amount of non-mission-critical traffic, in addition to traditional mission-critical safety-related traffic, which is negligible in comparison. Since computing and networking capabilities are no longer as abundant as in the past, there is the need to properly manage available resources. To ensure challenging QoS requirements, we propose a novel protocol suite specifically designed for our QoS-enabled semantic routing framework. Such a framework adopts an architecture that fits the characteristics of modern manufacturing environments and exploits an overlay networking solution providing a semantic routing substrate that operates both at the application and network layers.