A high-performance CAN-like arbitration scheme for EtherCAT

Author

Cena, Gianluca ; Bertolotti, Ivan Cibrario ; Valenzano, Adriano ; Zunino, Claudio

Author_Institution

IEIIT-CNR, Torino, Italy

fYear

2009

fDate

22-25 Sept. 2009

Firstpage

1

Lastpage

8

Abstract

EtherCAT is a popular Ethernet-based solution conceived for connecting devices at the shop floor in industrial environments. Even though it features very high communication efficiency, that permits thousands of I/O points to be periodically exchanged between controlling devices and decentralized periphery with cycle times well below 1 ms, it is not able to cope in a proper way with event-driven systems, where lots of devices may be producing asynchronous information in a sporadic and unpredictable way. In this paper, some modifications to the basic EtherCAT protocol are proposed which enable CAN-like arbitrations to take place in such networks, so as to achieve a true priority-based access scheme.

Keywords

local area networks; production engineering computing; EtherCAT; Ethernet-based solution; event-driven systems; high-performance CAN-like arbitration scheme; industrial environments; Access protocols; Communication industry; Communication system control; Control systems; Electrical equipment industry; Ethernet networks; Logic; Master-slave; Network topology; Proposals;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Emerging Technologies & Factory Automation, 2009. ETFA 2009. IEEE Conference on

Conference_Location

Mallorca

ISSN

1946-0759

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-2727-7

Electronic_ISBN

1946-0759

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ETFA.2009.5347000

Filename

5347000