Analysis Of Ethernet POWERLINK Real-time Ethernet

With the development of industrial automation, field bus has failed to meet therequirement of industrial process control featured by high-speed, high real-time andlarge capacity data transmission. Application of Ethernet technology in the field ofindustrial control is paid more and more attention. Communication speed and datacapacity of Ethernet are far higher than any field bus, however, for industrial controlreal-time and determination are more important than transmission speed and datacapacity. Therefore, the study of real-time Ethernet has become one of the most popularresearch topics of automation industry. Application of real-time Ethernet in industrialfield has become a trend, under the premise of protection of real-time and determination,high capacity and high-speed data transmission are provided to meet the growingrequirements of data transmission in industrial control field.According to the demand mentioned above, various real-time industrial Ethernetare emerged, for example Ethernet POWERLINK, Ethernet/IP, ProfinetRT and so on.Ethernet POWERLINK stands out, because of the advantages of open sourcetechnology, without Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) solutions,completely compatible with standard Ethernet (IEEE802.3standard) and fundamentalsolution of real-time and determination problem. This paper focuses on deep analysis ofPOWERLINK. It is necessary to do more research on POWERLINK, because researchand reference documents on POWERLINK currently are less. Mager works are asfollows:Firstly, the inevitability of real-time industrial Ethernet and existing technicalsolutions are described. Technical and application status and features are analyzed.Secondly, protocol is analysed. Focus on scheduling mechanism for data link layer,communication cycle and configuration and PDO configuration. Then, protocol stack isanalysed. Analyze the composition and function of source code of EthernetPOWERLINK protocol stack, espsially object dictionary modified when using procotolstack. Finally, the scheme and steps of simulation are proposed. The functions, featuresand modeling system of network simulation tool OPNET are analyzed. Then asimulation proposal and step are putfowd to provide a kind of research method forsubsequent researchers.