Performance Evaluation of Switched Ethernet for Real-time Industrial Network

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, IEC 61158 protocol including Profibus, WorldFIP, and Foundation Fieldbus is recently announced as an international standard. Many fieldbus protocols have an important advantage over the widely used protocols such as Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) in terms of the deterministic characteristics of the fieldbuses. However, the application of fieldbus has been limited due to the high cost of hardware and the difficulty in interfacing with multi-vendor products. In order to solve these problems, computer network ...