Leveraging named data networking for industrial automation: Opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Information Centric Networking (ICN) has emerged as a promising solution to address the data dissemination and scalability concerns with the traditional TCP/IP Internet architecture. Named Data Networking (NDN) is a prominent ICN architecture that supports in-network caching, easy-to-deploy multicast communication and in-built security mechanisms, thus facilitating efficient, secure and timely delivery of content to the end users. These attributes make NDN a promising solution to meet the requirements of IoT applications. Consequently, NDN based IoT deployments for health care to smart home systems, smart buildings and smart cities are on the rise. Nonetheless, the feasibility of using NDN for building next generation Industrial Automation and Control Systems (IACS) has not been studied. Industrial automation requires an efficient and scalable networking infrastructure that facilitates data sharing to drive operational improvements and develop business intelligence. Ethernet based networking solutions are becoming increasingly popular in IACS to provide seamless integration of industrial networks with the Internet. In this paper, we explore the possibilities to leverage the benefits of NDN to provide an efficient, flexible and scalable networking solution for IACS. We study the impact of making this radical change to industrial networks, highlighting the opportunities and challenges for future research and development in this direction. © 2020 IEEE.