From Brown-Field to Future Industrial Networks, a Case Study

Abstract

The network infrastructures in the future industrial networks need to accommodate, manage and guarantee performance to meet the converged Internet technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) traffics requirements. The pace of IT–OT networks development has been slow despite their considered benefits in optimizing the performance and enhancing information flows. The hindering factors vary from general challenges in performance management of the diverse traffic for green-field configuration to lack of outlines for evolving from brown-fields to the converged network. Focusing on the brown-field, this study provides additional insight into a brown-field characteristic to set a baseline that enables the subsequent step development towards the future’s expected converged networks. The case study highlights differences between real-world network behavior and the common assumptions for analyzing the network traffic covered in the literature. Considering the unsatisfactory performance of the existing methods for characterization of brown-field traffic, a performance and dynamics mixture measurement is proposed. The proposed method takes both IT and OT traffic into consideration and reduces the complexity, and consequently improves the flexibility, of performance and configuration management of the brown-field.