# Achieving Low Latency Communications in Smart Industrial Networks with Programmable Data Planes
## 7 Conclusions and Future Work  
IoT technologies are growing in industrial environments due to their usefulness, from product manufacturing development to advanced monitoring in any process. Even though IoT is undoubtedly effective, there are still some challenges that must be overcome. Current services and applications have strict performance needs, such as low transmission delay or packet error rate, so network design and management must evolve in order to meet the requirements. Specifically, these parameters are extremely important for critical messages, such as threshold exceeding alarms in industrial environments. It should be said that, in a normal operation of an industrial process, there should be few situations in which a certain threshold is exceeded and these should be treated with minimal delay. Therefore, our paper presents a solution that is based on the assumption that INC improves the efficiency of industrial processes thanks to a better network design. Our system proposes an architecture for the implementation of INC using DPP to provide response time and throughput enhancement in industrial environments, which follows the trend of current network development. Besides, our methodology implies experimental research using a real testbed to validate the concept and demonstrate the benefits of the proposed system. This is a crucial aspect of this paper, as it is fundamental to test and investigate the effective contribution of an idea to real environments. Results show that improved performance is achieved in terms of network parameters. In fact, DPP and P4 are demonstrated to be useful mechanisms for dealing with industrial communication challenges, and open the door for other possible applications. Future works in this field may study other possible applications of the proposed solution. Apart from alarm generation, packets could be simply dropped if certain conditions are not met, therefore reducing bandwidth usage, improving energy savings and efficiency, and decreasing computing resource consumption. Additionally, the improvement of other performance parameters with data plane programming is also feasible. Research could be done in security through the implementation of advanced packet processing functions, or even the offloading of traditionally server side functions. Multiple protocols are resource-hungry for scarce resource devices, such as those that provide security related functions. These procedures could be implemented in specifically designed devices, using DPP to manage the communication among all concerned entities. Currently DPP is an open study field and there are a lot of applications that can be developed towards the enhancement of numerous network features. This, paired with industrial processes, can provide a suitable environment for research and innovation. Besides, factories are in the middle of the transition towards the implementation of 5G networks, which entails new  
Figure 13: Comparison of throughput for edge and cloud MQTT communications with several threshold probabilities. (**a**) Number of TCP packets sent. (**b**) Throughput in bytes/s. challenges and opportunities. In this case, it is one of the main points of the new standard to bring computing resources closer to the final user, so similar approaches to the one proposed in this paper may be beneficial. **Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.A., D.F., J.S., J.A. and E.J. ; software, A.A.; Validation, A.A., D.F. and J.S. ; writing--original draft, A.A.; writing--review and editing, D.F., J.S., J.A. and E.J. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. **Funding:** This work was supported in part by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the national project (PID2019-108713 RB-C54) titled \"Towards zeRo toUch nEtwork and services for beyond 5G\" (TRUE-5G), and in part by the \"Smart Factories of the Future\" (5G-Factories) (COLAB19/06) project. **Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable. **Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.