Ethernet for industrial communications Unlike office communications, industrial and process automation are based on a multitude of different fieldbus systems (e.g. ASI, CAN, DeviceNet, Interbus, LON, PROFIBUS). Particular versions with additional performance features have established themselves in parallel for specific applications such as drive technology or safety technology. Generally, these...

Recently, much attention has been given to the need to endow industrial communication networks used in real-time systems with flexible scheduling. This allows control systems to adapt to the variations in the requirements of traffic generated by modifications in the environment of the system, or changes in its structure. Another active area is multimedia transmission in industrial environments....

Recent technological developments are pulling fieldbus networks to support a new wide class of applications, such as industrial multimedia applications. These applications are usually supported by the widely used TCP/IP stack. It is thus essential to provide support to TCP/IP based applications, in fieldbus networks. This paper presents an effort that is being carried out to integrate the TCP/I...

In this paper, a radio physical layer for a wireless fieldbus network is proposed. For this, a model is described and a performance evaluation is presented, by means of both measurements and analytical calculations of the Bit Error Rate (BER), using the Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) technology in static and dynamic modes, and of the timing of the basic message cycle, using Profibus as ...

The communication networks used by factory automation systems are beginning to employ solutions that, until recently, were used in different fields. In particular, at the lowest level of automation, where, typically, real time communication between controllers and sensors/actuators is required, both Ethernet and wireless networks are becoming solutions of interest. However, the introduction of ...