[RE] RTE summary paper
For those of you who haven't already seen it, there's an interesting
"Real-Time Ethernet" summary paper at
<www.felser.ch/download/FE-TR-0507.pdf>.
It is an invited IEEE paper by Max Felser. It was published in June
2005.
ABSTRACT
After more than ten years of experience with applications of fieldbus in
automation technology, the industry starts to develop and adopt Real-Time
Ethernet (RTE) solutions. There already exists now more than ten proposed
solutions. IEC
standards are trying to give a guideline and selection criteria based on
recognized indicators for the user.
...
SUMMARY
– CONCLUSION
The automation
technology user would like to see just one standard solution for
industrial Ethernet. At the moment, it looks like that there will be one
standard document IEC 61784-2 which specifies at least ten different and
most of them incompatible technical solutions for Real-Time Ethernet (see
Table II). Some of the proposed protocols are just defined and no
products exist at the moment. With others, there are already products and
applications available. There is in fact no technical reason to have so
many different realizations for Real-Time Ethernet. Reducing the number
of solutions for the convenience and benefits of the end-users is a focus
of on going discussions.
At the moment of writing this paper, the definitions of different classes
of applications and possible Communication Profiles is not finished. As
presented in this paper, in principle, one could live with a set of about
three different solutions for all possible applications. Is it up to the
end-user and the market to decide which one of the proposed solutions
fulfils the requirements of the automation applications and will end up
in real
applications!
Chris Travis