A new Approach for Increasing the Performance of the Industrial Ethernet System PROFINET

In today's realtime Ethernet systems two approaches can be differentiated regarding the organisation of the frame transmission: On the one hand there is a summation frame approach in which one frame can supply several nodes with data at the same time. On the other hand, there is the approach of providing data with individual frames for each node. The two most relevant factors influencing the performance in terms of the minimum achievable update time are the propagation delay and the frame transfer time. In this paper we introduce a new concept for reducing the minimum possible update time for individual frame based systems like PROFINET IRT. The performance evaluation compares the results of our concept with the summation frame based EtherCAT System.