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Enabling Industrial Network Slicing Orchestration: A Collaborative Edge Robotics Use Case

The consolidation of 5G technologies makes the Industry 4.0 establishment more feasible than ever. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Edge Computing aim at managing the multi-vendor industrial and network infrastructure and guaranteeing the high-performance requirements of industrial processes. Furthermore, industrial production workflows require the collaboration between robots, actuators and sensors in the factory floor. In this direction, Network Slicing allows the deployment of complex end-to-end network services, enabling the collaboration of industrial applications of different vendors and ensuring low latency, safety and optimal resource management. Extending the standard ETSI NFV reference architecture, this article proposes a deployment and orchestration mechanism for enabling Cross-Slice Communication (CSC) in industrial environments. For evaluation purposes, a Warehouse Robotics use case, which requires the collaboration of mobile robotic agents in an automated storage and retrieval system, is used. The experimental results show the significant improvements in the expected mission completion delay and transmission time when using the propounded CSC approach compared to other inter-communication methods.