Using Firewire as industrial network

In the near future, industrial applications will have communication needs which will exceed the performance provided by existing fieldbuses. Other fields of activity, like multimedia on the PC, have encountered the same situation, which led to new, high performance networks and protocols. Nevertheless, these do not consider the same requirements as in the industrial field. Therefore, it is impossible to use those networks in their current state. As IEEE-1394 “Firewire” presents very valuable characteristics for communication in industrial applications, we analyze the possibility of using it for industrial control. The conclusion of this analysis shows that Firewire has very appealing characteristics for industrial control. Moreover, a comparison against a very efficient fieldbus shows that performance improvements introduced by Firewire are around a factor of 10 in the worst case