# Towards Flexible Integration of 5G and IIoT Technologies in Industry 4.0: A Practical Use Case
## 2 Related Work
### 5G, NFV and SDN in Industrial Environments  
The 5 GPPP association, a European initiative concerned with the delivery of solutions, architectures, technologies, and standards for the ubiquitous next-generation communication infrastructures [6], identified seven different verticals to the targets of the next wave of 5G applications: Automotive, Manufacturing, Media, Energy, Public Safety and SmartCities. A series of R&D projects under the 5 GPPP programme such as 5 GTANGO [7], 5G SMART [8], 5G CONNI [9], and 5G-Transformer [10] has worked on developing 5G pilots for several of these vertical use cases, with some of them focusing on smart manufacturing and Industry 4.0 use cases. There are also initiatives such as the 5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation (5G-ACIA) [11] pushing for the integration of 5G technologies in the manufacturing vertical. Fraunhofer's International Center for Networked, Adaptive Production (ICNAP) [12], was founded in late 2016 to find out which new approaches in information technology can lead the way towards Industry 4.0. NFV and SDN are consolidated technologies that have provided substantial benefits to the world of communications and computing for the past decade. However, as vertical industries evolve towards an adoption of the emerging 5G technologies [13], the range of application of 5G technologies such as NFV and SDN is expanding. [PERSON] et al. [14] presented a review of technological trends in the world of industrial communication, highlighting the role of 5G technologies in industrial automation. The article calls for the adoption of 5G technologies such as NFV and SDN to achieve harmonized service provisioning on top of the heterogeneity and complexity of industrial networks, in which Ethernet and 5G communication and legacy industrial communication systems will likely coexist. Similarly, [PERSON] and [PERSON] [15] highlighted the critical role that 5G technologies will play in enabling the ultra-low latency and reliability and high data rate requirements of Industry 4.0, and in driving several of its use cases. Precisely, several efforts to bring NFV and SDN technologies into industrial environments have already been carried in the context of the Industry 4.0 revolution. These contributions align with the fundamental intentions of the present article, as they demonstrate that the intelligence and overall quality of industrial processes can be enhanced thanks to more flexible and fine-grained communications while addressing limitations of traditional network architectures such as lack of automation and adaptivity to varying and requirements imposed by heterogeneous use cases. [PERSON] et al. [16] proposed the deployment of an SDN-based infrastructure in an industrial environment, which, also leveraging network virtualization and NFV for the implementation of network services, optimizes service quality and improves industrial production efficiency. [PERSON] et al. [17] demonstrated how NFV technology can greatly simplify the realization of a smart manufacturing application, in which several network services are deployed to interconnect machines and to collect and aggregate sensor data. [PERSON] et al. [18] showcased the implementation of a 5G experimental platform for Tactile Internet in industrial environments leveraging NFV and SDN technologies. Other work (e.g., [19; 20]) focus on the applicability of NFV and SDN to deploy security services and enhance security in industrial networks. Although this is not specifically a direct objective of the integration of NFV and SDN in our work, they illustrate how the adoption of these technologies can lay the foundations for the implementation of more robust and flexible security mechanisms and applications in comparison to traditional industrial networks.