Encapsulation of Industrial Ethernet Protocols over 5G Networks Using L2TPv3 Tunneling

Industry 4.0 demands high reliability and ultra-low latency communications. Although 5G's Ultra-Reliable Low-Latency Communications (URLLC) meets these requirements, native support for Industrial Ethernet protocols over 5G via Ethernet-type PDU sessions remains unavailable. In this context, this paper proposes and validates an encapsulation technique using the Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol version 3 (L2TPv3) to carry Industrial Ethernet frames over a 5G network emulated with OpenAirInterface and Linux network namespaces. Integration tests confirm successful PROFINET transmission through the 5G RAN, with L2TPv3 encapsulation overhead consistently below 0.25 ms, satisfying the 1 ms URLLC latency budget.