Industrial Knee-jerk: In-Network Simultaneous Planning and Control on a TSN Switch

Rapid advances in programmable network devices catalyzed the development of in-network computing, which is foreseen as a key enabler to empower the intelligence of production lines and mechanical arms in Industry 4.0. Various pioneering approaches have demonstrated the significant benefits of moving simple yet delay-sensitive industrial control tasks performed by servers to network switches. However, our detailed field study at a top-tier auto glass factory reveals that current practice fails to achieve a real-time and deterministic intelligent decision closure as leaving those complex yet essential planning tasks still on edge or cloud. In this paper, we design and implement a brand-new industrial switch, named Netopia, on a commercial Zynq platform through software and hardware co-design. Netopia enables planning and control to simultaneously perform on a network switch during communication. At the core of Netopia are three simple yet effective modules - a determinism guarantee mechanism, a computing acceleration scheme, and a packet deterministic forwarding framework that work hand-in-hand to ensure mechanical arms obtain intelligent control commands with low and deterministic latency. Comprehensive evaluations in industrial environments demonstrate that Netopia achieves an average end-to-end intelligent decision latency of 3.0ms with a jitter < 0.4ms, reduced by > 86% over existing works.