Distributed Real-Time Protocols for Industrial Control Systems: Framework and Examples

The automation of today's large-scale industrial systems relies on the operation of distributed controller devices that perform local computations and exchange information via communication networks. The subject of this paper is the development of a family of shared-medium industrial communication protocols that support the transmission of real-time (RT) and nonreal-time (nRT) data among distributed controller devices. Different from existing protocols, we suggest to incorporate information that is available from the control application in the protocol definition. As a result, our protocols dynamically change the bandwidth allocation on the shared medium according to the instantaneous communication requirements while ensuring hard RT guarantees. Following the recent developments in industrial automation, our protocols can be realized as software layers on top of low-cost conventional Ethernet.