Measurements and performance analysis of 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.

This paper studies Industrial Ethernet performance under different circumstances using the network simulation package (OPNET).

Firstly, a validation procedure to the use of OPNET in simulating such networks was made by comparing OPNET performance with practical experiments once and then with analytical models results.

Then OPNET was used to study the effect of different parameters on the real time performance of the network.

It was found that some parameters like (packet length, number of nodes and packet production rate) have minor effect on the network performance, while the others (packets processing rate and FTP traffic transferred to an industrial node) could affect seriously on the network behavior.