Virtualization of Industrial Real-Time Networks for Containerized Controllers.

The virtualization technology has a great potential to improve the manageability and scalability of industrial control systems, as it can host and consolidate computing resources very efficiently. There accordingly have been efforts to utilize the virtualization technology for industrial control systems, but the research for virtualization of traditional industrial real-time networks, such as Controller Area Network (CAN), has been done in a very limited scope. Those traditional fieldbuses have distinguished characteristics from well-studied Ethernet-based networks; thus, it is necessary to study how to support their inherent functions transparently and how to guarantee Quality-of-Service (QoS) in virtualized environments.