Home // International Journal On Advances in Networks and Services, volume 6, numbers 3 and 4, 2013 // View article

Quality of Service Aware Configuration of Network Equipment in Industrial Environments

Authors:
György Kálmán

Keywords: industrial Ethernet, QoS, metrics, engineering, infrastructure, switch, configuration, life cycle, multi vendor

Abstract:
Industrial Ethernet offers greater flexibility and potentially lower deployment costs than traditional fieldbuses. Ethernet is already the preferred communication technology from the controller and is expected to penetrate the instrument area also. Engineering and operation of these networks is introducing new challenges in the industrial automation field, including the lack of appropriate Quality of Service (QoS) metrics for these applications. This paper presents an overview of the industrial Ethernet landscape, shows the challenges around QoS parameters and shows an example engineering support function. Through this example, it presents different approaches and decisions taken for the proof of concept implementation. An overview about the issues related to representation and generation of configuration data, support of multiple vendors in the engineering phase and also during operation. The paper concludes with showing the differences between QoS metrics in industrial and office networks. The implemented proof-of-concept tool shows that bulk configuration of devices opens a QoS aware deployment process.

Pages: 198 to 207

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2013. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2013

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2644