Experimental Performance Evaluation of BACnet MS/TP Protocol

BACnet is a standard data communication protocol especially designed for building automation and control networks. BACnet uses the Master-Slave/Token-Passing (MS/TP) protocol as one of its field-level networks. In this study, the performance of the BACnet MS/TP protocol is evaluated using an experimental model. The network performance is investigated and evaluated in terms of token rotation time and round trip time. The experimental results show that the performance of the MS/TP network is heavily influenced by the network traffic load, the assignment of MS/TP node address and the network configuration parameter called Nmax_info_frames. Based on the experimental results, simple practical designing guidelines for BACnet MS/TP network systems are also proposed.