Requirements and solutions for the support of heterogeneous types of traffic in the industrial environment

The Internet is revolutionizing the communications in the industrial environment. It is becoming increasingly important to bring predominant upper protocol stacks down to the field level. This makes possible the easier introduction of advanced applications relevant for instance to the support of industrial multimedia or the provision of Web remote maintenance and configuration services. The successful and seamless integration of different types of traffic having heterogeneous requirements is characterised by specific parameters that need to be respected by the communication protocol used in the industrial environment. This paper analyses the different parameters that need to be respected by the industrial communication infrastructure while it presents the available solutions for the different predominant industrial communication protocols.