Securing the Industrial-Tactile Internet of Things With Deterministic Silicon Photonics Switches

Today's best-effort (BE) Internet of Things (IoT) faces challenges in providing the end-to-end-performance, security, and energy efficiency needed for the Smart Systems of the 21st century. These future smart systems will include smart cities, smart transportation systems, and smart manufacturing. This paper surveys the security weaknesses of the BE IoT. The BE-IoT cannot be partitioned into distinct interference-free virtual networks, which compromises performance, cyber-security, and energy efficiency. The design of a secure deterministic industrial-tactile IoT core network, which can embed millions of distinct secure deterministic virtual networks (SD-VNs) in layer 2, is then presented. Deterministic communications, combined with low-jitter scheduling, offers several benefits: 1) the removal of all congestion, interference, and DOS attacks; 2) a significant reduction in IoT router buffer sizes; 3) a significant reduction in IoT energy use; 4) a reduction of end-to-end IoT delays to the speed of light in fiber; and 5) deterministic packet switches are relatively easy to synthesize using FPGA technologies. These benefits apply to optical and 5G wireless networks. Future smart systems can reserve their own congestion-free SD-VNs in layer 2 to manage their traffic, with significantly improved performance, security, and energy efficiency. A speed-of-light deterministic IoT core network can transform cloud services in the 21st century by exploiting a new technology: FPGAs combined with silicon photonics transceivers to achieve terabits/second of optical bandwidth. To illustrate the transformational potential, Big Data green cloud computing over a secure deterministic IoT spanning the European Union is explored.