QoS in switched Industrial Ethernet

As Industrial Ethernet evolves it will increasingly include integration with the “IT network” in order to utilize the benefits which the use of Ethernet provides. This will result in a mixed protocol environment also in the industrial networks, which in turn will require proper usage of QoS in order to maintain the demanding requirements of latency, jitter and packet loss in the Industrial Ethernet protocols. This paper highlights the emerging need for using QoS as well as some other related technologies in Industrial Ethernet networks and outlines some guidelines to achieve well-performing networks and efficient communication both for real-time control data and other less time critical data.