What do you know about Industrial Ethernet? Do you know the difference between it and Ethernet? Have you ever touched a product with an industrial Ethernet interface? Have you noticed the trend? In this article, you will learn about the origins of Industrial Ethernet, the three main types of Industrial Ethernet and their applications.
1. Origin of Industrial Ethernet
Due to the rapid development of information technology, communication has become the key to real-time control of the neighborhood, the need to establish a unified, open communication standards has been imminent, but the existing fieldbus does not meet this demand.
Although the same fieldbus is interchangeable and interoperable, but the compatibility between different fieldbuses is poor, between the communication is more difficult, the middle also needs a gateway to realize the conversion of the two protocols. This results in high costs, complex equipment and great inconvenience.
Industrial Ethernet was thus born!
As we all know, Industrial Ethernet comes from Ethernet. Commonly, Ethernet is used in industrial control systems, and this network is called Industrial Ethernet. To be more professional and specific, Industrial Ethernet is a distributed real-time control communication network built on IEEE802.3 series standards and TCP/IP, which is suitable for occasions with large data transmission and high transmission speed requirements.
It adopts CSMA/CD protocol and is compatible with TCP/IP protocol at the same time. Compared with ordinary Ethernet, Industrial Ethernet needs to solve many problems such as openness, real-time, synchronization, reliability, anti-interference and security. Therefore, it is getting more and more popular in automated production.
2. Three kinds of mainstream industrial Ethernet
There are several mainstream industrial Ethernet in the field at present, such as: PROFINET, POWERLINK, ETHERNET/IP, ETHERCAT, SERCOSIII and so on. This article mainly introduces three kinds.
1) EtherCAT:The key element of EtherCAT is that all networked slaves are able to extract only the relevant information required from the packet and insert the data into the frame when transmitting it downstream.The EtherCAT protocol itself eliminates the need to receive Ethernet packets, decode them, and then copy the process data to the individual devices later. It has a master-slave data exchange principle, which requires the master and slave to work together, making EtherCAT ideal for communication between master and slave controllers. It improves the real-time performance of the system and the topology flexibility at the same time, the cost is not higher than the cost of using fieldbus.
2) EtherNET/IP: Uses the physical layer of Ethernet, the data link layer and the TCP/IP protocol. It is a widely used application-layer industrial Ethernet protocol offered primarily by Rockwell Automation. Allows industrial devices to exchange time-critical application information such as sensors, actuators, robots, etc. It can support an unlimited number of nodes due to its standard Ethernet switching. Its main functions are three, one is real-time control: based on the configuration information stored in the controller or intelligent device, real-time control can be realized through the state changes in the network communication; the second is network configuration: through the bus can realize the configuration of the same layer network, but also can realize the configuration of the lower layer network; the third is the data acquisition: can be based on the established beat or the application need to conveniently realize the data acquisition.
(3) PROFINET: is used for PROFIBUS vertical integration, open, unified complete system solutions, it can be the existing PROFIBUS network through the proxy server connected to the Ethernet, so that factory automation and enterprise information service management automation organically into one. It is able to meet the new demands of user machines and factories which are more demanding, flexible and constantly changing.PROFINET provides a complete network solution for automation communication, including real-time Ethernet, motion control, distributed automation, fail-safe, and cyber-security, which are the hot topics in the automation field at present. In addition, it is fully compatible with Industrial Ethernet and existing fieldbus (e.g. PROFIBUS) technologies, protecting existing investments.