Performance evaluation of switched Ethernet for real-time industrial communications

The real-time industrial network, often referred to as fieldbus, is an important element for building automated manufacturing systems. Thus, in order to satisfy the real-time requirements of field devices such as sensors, actuators, and controllers, numerous standard organizations and vendors have developed various fieldbus protocols. As a result, the IEC 61158 standard, including Profibus, WorldFIP, and Foundation Fieldbus, was recently announced as an international standard. These fieldbus protocols have an important advantage over the widely used Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) in terms of the deterministic characteristics. However, the application of fieldbus has been limited due to the high cost of hardware and the difficulty in interfacing with multivendor products. In order to solve these problems, the computer network technology, especially Ethernet, is being adopted by the industrial automation field. The key technical obstacle for Ethernet for industrial applications is that its nondeterministic behavior makes it inadequate for real-time applications, where the frames containing real-time information, such as control command and alarm signal, have to be delivered within a certain time limit. Recently, the development of switched Ethernet shows a very promising prospect for industrial applications due to the elimination of uncertainties in the network operation that leads to the dramatically improved performance. This paper focuses on the application of the switched Ethernet for industrial communications. More specifically, this paper presents the performance evaluation of the switched Ethernet on an experimental network testbed along with an implementation method for using the switched Ethernet for industrial automation.

[1]  G. Kaplan.  Ethernet's winning ways , 2001 .

[2]  B. G. Kim,et al.  The Expected (Not Worst-Case) Throughput of the Ethernet Protocol , 1991, IEEE Trans. Computers.

[3]  William Stallings,et al.  Local and Metropolitan Area Networks , 1993 .

[4]  Stefano Vitturi.  On the use of Ethernet at low level of factory communication systems , 2001, Comput. Stand. Interfaces.

[5]  U. Ruckert,et al.  Measurements in switched Ethernet networks used for automation systems , 2000, 2000 IEEE International Workshop on Factory Communication Systems. Proceedings (Cat. No.00TH8531).

[6]  Y. Tipsuwan,et al.  Network-based control systems: a tutorial , 2001, IECON'01. 27th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (Cat. No.37243).

[7]  Liaoyuan Chen,et al.  A prototype switched Ethernet data acquisition system , 1999 .

[8]  Jaehyun Park,et al.  An extended TCP/IP protocol for real-time local area networks , 1998 .

[9]  Dave Roberts.  Developing for the Internet with Winsock , 1995 .

[10]  Andreas Willig,et al.  Ring stability of the PROFIBUS token-passing protocol over error-prone links , 2001, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron..

[11]  Ieee Standards Board.  IEEE standards for local and metropolitan area networks : supplement to Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CSMA/CD) access method and physical layer specifications : layer management (section 5) , 1991 .

[12]  James Moyne,et al.  Performance evaluation of control networks: Ethernet, ControlNet, and DeviceNet , 2001 .

[13]  Hong Ye,et al.  Scheduling of networked control systems , 2001 .

[14]  Suk Lee,et al.  On-line fuzzy performance management of Profibus networks , 2001, Comput. Ind..

[15]  Baek-Young Choi,et al.  Probabilistic approach to switched Ethernet for real-time control applications , 2000, Proceedings Seventh International Conference on Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications.

[16]  Katsuhiko Ogata,et al.  Modern Control Engineering , 1970 .

[17]  Kenneth J. Christensen.  A simulation study of enhanced arbitration methods for improving Ethernet performance , 1998, Comput. Commun..