The goal of this project was to integrate a virtualized monitoring application running on the Fraunhofer Edge Cloud (FEC) into the Shopfloor at Fraunhofer 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.

The main challenge of connect virtual machines to the TSN network is the needed access to TSN capable network interface card (NIC) at the FEC.  This obstacle was addressed by 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.

The TSN gateway creates an infrastructure at the Fraunhofer IPT to test and validate further projects regarding cloud based real time systems.