Steganographic safety layer over IP

Industrial communications have been evolving and, nowadays, in view of the demands for horizontal and vertical integration, the number of applications consuming safety data over IP networks have also been increasing. In light of this scenario, instead of using a safety fieldbus protocol over IP, this paper proposed the use of some principles from IEC 61784 over a common TCP/IP channel. As the optimization of bandwidth use is a key factor in Internet communication, this paper proposes a lightweight safety layer in terms of both computational and bandwidth costs, with the use of concepts from steganography to provide safety. Through the paper, some measures to allow such a safety communication over TCP/IP are presented and, finally, an evaluation of the proposed protocol for safety data is performed, showing it may be able to reach both SIL3 and SIL4 depending on the BER of the considered communication channel.