Design And Implementation Of Industrial Ethernet Protocol Based On The Separation Of Control And Forwarding

Industrial Ethernet protocol POWERLINK is a high real-time bus protocol and it is open completely. Except for meeting the needs of Industrial equipment with real-time performance, users can make compatible with standard Ethernet POWERLINK protocol easily. POWERLINK protocol, which is paid much attention by Industrial areas, achieves more agreement with the introduction of the Industrial Internet and Industry4.0.However, the study of POWERLINK currently is limited by its little expansion and it is impossible to meet the requirement of massive network. On the basis of studying existing industrial Ethernet, this thesis proposes an Industrial Ethernet protocol based on the separation of control and forwarding with the idea of Software-defined networking (SDN) and carries out the implementation and verification.This thesis introduces firstly the advantages of POWERLINK network in industrial control area and the main idea and design principles of SDN, then makes analysis and research of the data link layer and application layer in POWERLINK protocol deeply. The engineering based on the idea of SDN substitutes OpenFlow switch designing by this thesis for traditional hub or switch, and POWERLINK network can forward it’s data frame by matching flow table in Openflow switches, solving the issues of little expansion in POWERLINK network that it has a high real-time. This paper describes the design ideas and key mechanisms of Industrial Ethernet protocol based on the separation of control and forwarding as well as the related design in this protocol of the table and data forwarding rules, introduces the specific implementation process of master and slave, cross-communication, and the cycle of EPL in POWERLINK network.Finally, the test environments based on Linux Operating system are built, and it is used for testing, by using both of openCONFIGURATOR and network analysis tool Wireshark, the Industrial Ethernet protocol based on the separation of controlling and forwarding designed by this thesis. This paper tests two operation modes in slot allocation of POWERLINK and the synchronous data transmission, Asynchronous data transmission and cross-communication. The result shows that all nodes using POWERLINK protocol can communicate normally with the high real-time.