Analysis and design of a guaranteed real time performance enhanced industrial ethernet

Abstract EN

Industrial Ethernet is a new trend in technology designed to replace the traditional industrial solutions such as point to point and field bus systems.

The paper aims studying Industrial Ethernet performance under hard real time system conditions.

Substation automation system is chosen to be the environment in which Industrial Ethernet was assumed to be installed.

OPNET package is used to simulate the behavior of such a system.

From running the simulation model, the different parameters affecting the system performance were determined.

Three solutions are presented to enhance real time performance of Industrial Ethernet.

First of all, the negative effect of FTP transfer to an industrial node is solved using a new method called FTP traffic shaping which is presented to enhance the performance of the system while keeping the same nodes performance.

The second direction is to enhance nodes operation using multicasting / VLAN techniques.

The third motivation is studying the effect on non real time traffic flowing between non industrial nodes on the system behavior ; different techniques were suggested to enhance the network performance and a modified Etherchannel switch architecture is proposed.