Monitoring of real-time behavior of industrial ethernet for industry 4.0

Industrial communication is on its way from field-bus to Ethernet. In an industry 4.0 scenario various applications and branches in automated manufacturing, process industry and intra logistics are affected. Here, Ethernet communication will not be limited to the communication between controllers and devices such as programmable logic controllers (PLC) and sensors and actors, but will also be applied to the communication between all nodes, regardless of its dedicated functionality. A quite similar development takes place in the automotive industry. Ethernet-based communication links are emerging. In-vehicle communication from electronic control unit (ECU) to ECU and to sensors and actors are considered for Ethernet communication. In both areas low cost realtime Ethernet implementation is required. Such a low cost implementation consists of standard silicon implementation of real time features and simple, cheap cabling. These Ethernet links will be implemented partially and will coexist with standard implementation. For such partial implementations, we propose a test and online monitoring method for accessing latency and path delays as well as synchronization quality.