Abstract

Traditional Networked Control Systems control physical machinery in factories and production environments via centralized on-site network controllers. This architecture is increasingly challenged by rising amounts of sensory and actuator control data and reconfigurable, highly dynamic production sites. A recent trend in Network Control tries to move control algorithms towards remote environments such as the cloud rather than closer to the controlled machinery. While this may satisfy the growing demand for computation resources in industrial settings, simply moving logic into the cloud introduces unpredictable latency and jitter that may break intricate control loops. In this demo, we present an approach that offloads latency-critical parts of the control logic to in-network elements. We combine the P4 network programming language with industrial control algorithms and execute both in eBPF virtual environments on the in-network elements. This technique enables to lower latency and jitter in production environments, providing a significantly higher quality of control even in adverse conditions.