Communication conundrum [industrial Ethernet

Abstract

There is increasing pressure on manufacturers in all sectors of industry to improve processes, reduce costs and boost productivity. Ethernet technology has been hailed as the key to achieving all these goals, and to boosting companies' competitiveness on increasingly aggressive global markets. The move to Industrial Ethernet has been rapid across all sectors of industry, and represents a step change from the standardisation on the various open and proprietary fieldbus protocols that was seen during the 1990s. Industrial Ethernet, in essence, is the use of Ethernet as the data link layer protocol in the OSI seven-layer model, with a fieldbus protocol as the application layer. This is conceptually similar to the various fieldbus options that are actually the use of RS232/485 as the data link layer, with the fieldbus protocol itself at the application layer.