An approach for physical topology exploration in wired bus networks

Fieldbus networks are widely used in the automation area. Normally the wired fieldbus networks can detect the existence of nodes and links, but lack the capability of measuring their physical positions. However, the information about nodes physical location is useful for network maintenance and control. Moreover, there is a trend to develop location-based and context-based services in the future. Particularly in some implementations, high bandwidth and critical time performance are not the most essential demands, people may prefer to distribute the nodes in a flexible way and keep tracking their positions. This paper describes a wired bus network, which can support large scale networks with flexible node distribution. Based on this network, we propose a method to measure wire length and explore the bus physical topology. This approach is able to identify the distance between nodes and detect the position of branches. The experiment demonstrates that the approach achieves high precision in the exploration of network physical topology.