Emerging concepts such as Smart Production,
Industrial Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 bring a radically
new set of requirements to the way industrial systems are
engineered. In what concerns the communication infrastructure,
support to dynamic environments, interoperability and
heterogeneity, combined with a significant increase in the
number of devices, are just a few of the challenges that must be
faced.

Software-defined networking is a disruptive networking
paradigm that emerged on campus networks but was soon
considered for use at industrial level. This paper presents a set of
extensions to the Software Defined Networking (SDN) OpenFlow
protocol that complement its functionality, namely supporting
real-time reservations, which is one of its more notorious
limitations when considering industrial scenarios. We explain
how the extensions are implemented in the OpenFlow side and
enforced using a Flexible Time-Triggered Ethernet network. The
extensions are validated experimentally, showing that the
platform supports dynamically reconfigurable heterogeneous
traffic classes.