Performance Measurements in a Manufacturing Communication System

This paper presents and analyses a low cost and high performance manufacturing communication system. It consists in the standard TOP profile implemented in single processor computer connected to a IEEE 802.3 LAN. High throughput is achieved by an efficient implementation architecture based on specific layer interfaces and data structures, specialized mechanisms of memory management, timer management and task scheduling. Performance measurement results show a throughput efficiency that attains, for MAC Layer user, 6 Mbit/s for a remote communication and 42 Mbit/s for loopback configuration. A throughput of 2 Mbit/s is obtained for the Presentation Layer user. The most important bottlenecks are analysed and consist, in important descending order, in the Transport acknowledgment step frequency, Transport checksum, LLC memory copy, memory management and task scheduling.