The ICNAP Research Sprint aimed to integrate a real-time monitoring application on the Fraunhofer Edge Cloud into the IPT Shopfloor. Due to restricted access to FEC Hypervisors, configuration was handled by the German Edge Cloud. Real-time communication was achieved using a TSN gateway connected to a TSN-capable NIC, which allowed VMs to send data with proper scheduling and priority settings.
| Topic Fields | |
| Published | 2022 |
| Involved Institutes | |
| Project Type | ICNAP Research/Transfer Project |
| Responsibles |
This ICNAP Research Sprint had the goal to integrate a virtualized monitoring application running on the Fraunhofer Edge Cloud (FEC) into the Shopfloor at IPT. The monitoring application needs to run in real time, thus the computation on the cloud as well as the communication to the machine in the shopfloor needs to be deterministic. Regarding real time computation several methods and technologies were identified in a prior ICNAP study. Lacking full access to configure the FEC Hypervisors this task can only be done by the German Edge Cloud. Further the real time communication to the shopfloor from an IT System like the FEC using Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), was realized also in a prior ICNAP Sprint. The main challenge to connect virtual machines to the TSN network is the needed assigned access to TSN capable network interface card (NIC) at the FEC. In this Sprint we addressed to overcome this obstacle implementing a TSN gateway. The TSN gateway is pinned to a TSN capable NIC. VMs requiring real time communication are connected to the TSN gateway and sending their data through this gateway. All scheduling of the VMs’ data and assignment of priorities as well as setting TSN specific parameters is happing in the gateway.
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