Ethernet - a survey on its fields of application

During the last decades, Ethernet progressively became the most widely used local area networking (LAN) technology. Apart from LAN installations, Ethernet became also attractive for many other fields of application, ranging from industry to avionics, telecommunication, and multimedia. The expanded application of this technology is mainly due to its significant assets like reduced cost, backward-compatibility, flexibility, and expandability. However, this new trend raises some problems concerning the services of the protocol and the requirements for each application. Therefore, specific adaptations prove essential to integrate this communication technology in each field of application. Our primary objective is to show how Ethernet has been enhanced to comply with the specific requirements of several application fields, particularly in transport, embedded and multimedia contexts. The paper first describes the common Ethernet LAN technology and highlights its main features. It reviews the most important specific Ethernet versions with respect to each application field’s requirements. Finally, we compare these different fields of application and we particularly focus on the fundamental concepts and the quality of service capabilities of each proposal

A Comprehensive Review on Time Sensitive Networks with a Special Focus on Its Applicability to Industrial Smart and Distributed Measurement Systems

The groundbreaking transformations triggered by the Industry 4.0 paradigm have dramati-cally reshaped the requirements for control and communication systems within the factory systems of the future. The aforementioned technological revolution strongly affects industrial smart and distributed measurement systems as well, pointing to ever more integrated and intelligent equipment devoted to derive accurate measurements. Moreover, as factory automation uses ever wider and complex smart distributed measurement systems, the well-known Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm finds its viability also in the industrial context, namely Industrial IoT (IIoT). In this context, communication networks and protocols play a key role, directly impacting on the measurement accuracy, causality, reliability and safety. The requirements coming both from Industry 4.0 and the IIoT, such as the coexistence of time-sensitive and best effort traffic, the need for enhanced horizontal and vertical integration, and interoperability between Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT), fostered the development of enhanced communication subsystems. Indeed, established tech-nologies, such as Ethernet and Wi-Fi, widespread in the consumer and office fields, are intrinsically non-deterministic and unable to support critical traffic. In the last years, the IEEE 802.1 Working Group defined an extensive set of standards, comprehensively known as Time Sensitive Networking (TSN), aiming at reshaping the Ethernet standard to support for time-, mission-and safety-critical traffic. In this paper, a comprehensive overview of the TSN Working Group standardization activity is provided, while contextualizing TSN within the complex existing industrial technological panorama, particularly focusing on industrial distributed measurement systems. In particular, this paper has to be considered a technical review of the most important features of TSN, while underlining its applicability to the measurement field. Furthermore, the adoption of TSN within the Wi-Fi technology is addressed in the last part of the survey, since wireless communication represents an appealing opportunity in the industrial measurement context. In this respect, a test case is presented, to point out the need for wirelessly connected sensors networks. In particular, by reviewing some literature contributions it has been possible to show how wireless technologies offer the flexibility necessary to support advanced mobile IIoT applications

Aikakriittisen Ethernet-verkon toteuttaminen hyödyntäen Time-Sensitive Networking -tekniikkaa

Tämän kandidaatintyön tarkoituksena on tutkia Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) -tekniikkaa sekä sitä edeltänyttä Audio Video Bridging (AVB) -tekniikkaa. TSN on joukko IEEE:n 802 Ethernet alastandardeja, jotka mahdollistavat aikakriittisen tietoliikenteen siirtämisen tavallisessa Ethernet-verkossa. Työssä ei käsitellä aivan kaikkia TSN:n standardeja, vaan TSN:n toiminnan kannalta oleellisimmat standardit. Myös TSN:ää edeltänyt AVB käsitellään lyhyesti, koska jotkin TSN:n standardit pohjautuvat AVB:n standardeihin. TSN:n standardeihin perehtymisen lisäksi työssä käydään läpi, mitä TSN:n standardeja tukevia laitteita markkinoilla on jo olemassa tämän työn kirjoittamisen aikana. Viimeisenä osana työtä esitellään työssä toteutettu kokeellinen toteutus, jonka tarkoituksena oli demonstroida TSN:n toimintaa tietoverkossa, joka koostui kahdesta päätepistelaitteesta sekä kahdesta kytkimestä. Markkinoilla olevien TSN:n standardeja tukevien laitteiden löytämiseksi selvitettiin, mitkä teollisuus- ja teknologiayritykset ovat mukana TSN:n kehittämisessä. Tämän tiedon perusteella yrityksien tuotevalikoimia käytiin yksitellen läpi samalla karsien joukosta pois kaikki yritykset, joiden tuotevalikoimassa ei ollut TSN:ää tukevia tuotteita. TSN:n kokeellista toteutusta ei saatu kokonaisuudessaan suoritettua demonstraatiossa ilmenneen lisenssiongelman vuoksi. Työssä kuitenkin saatiin suoritettua TSN:n toiminnallisuuden konfigurointi tietoverkon kytkimiin sekä demonstroitua TSN:n aikasynkronointiominaisuus. Työssä myös osoitettiin, että olemassa olevilla laitteilla ja niiden käyttöön liittyvillä ohjeilla olisi mahdollista toteuttaa kokonainen TSN:n toiminnallisuuksia demonstroiva toteutus. Täten työtä ja sen lähteitä voidaan hyödyntää tulevaisuudessa perinpohjaisempaan TSN:n ominaisuuksien demonstroitiin

Time Sensitive Networking Protocol Implementation for Linux End Equipment

By bringing industrial-grade robustness and reliability to Ethernet, Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) offers an IEEE standard communication technology that enables interoperability between standard-conformant industrial devices from any vendor. It also eliminates the need for physical separation of critical and non-critical communication networks, which allows a direct exchange of data between operation centers and companies, a concept at the heart of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). This article describes creating an end-to-end TSN network using specialized PCI Express (PCIe) cards and two final Linux endpoints. For this purpose, the two primary standards of TSN, IEEE 802.1AS (regarding clock synchronization), and IEEE 802.1Qbv (regarding time scheduled traffic) have been implemented in Linux equipment as well as a configuration and monitoring system.This work has been supported by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of Spain within the project TEC2017-84011-R and FEDER funds as well as by the Department of Education of the Basque Government within the fund for research groups of the Basque university system IT978-16

Design of a New High Bandwidth Network for Agricultural Machines

Ethernet is by now the most adopted bus for fast digital communications in many environments, from household entertainment to PLC robotics in industrial assembly lines. Even in automotive industry, the interest in this technology is increasingly growing, pushed forward by research and by the need of high throughput that high dynamics distributed control demands. Although 100base-TX physical layer (PHY) does not seem to meet EMC requirements for vehicular and heavy-duty environments, OPEN Alliance BroadR Reach (soon becoming IEEE standard as IEEE 802.3bw) technology is the most promising and already adopted Ethernet-compatible PHY, reaching 100Mbps over an unshielded twisted pair. An agricultural machine is usually a system including tractor and one or more implements attached to it, to the back or to the front. Nowadays, a specific CAN-based distributed control network support treatments and applications, namely ISOBUS, defined by ISO 11783. This work deals with architectural and technological aspects of advanced Ethernet networks in order to provide a high-throughput deterministic network for in-vehicle distributed control for agricultural machinery. Two main paths of investigation will be presented: one concerning the prioritization of standard Ethernet taking advantage of standard ways of prioritization in well-established technologies; the other changing the channel access method of Ethernet using an industrial fieldbus, chosen after careful investigation. The prioritization of standard Ethernet is performed at two, non-mutual exclusive layers of the ISO OSI stack: one at L3, using the diffserv (former TOS) Ip field; one at L2, using the priorities defined in IEEE 802.1p, used in IEEE 802.1q (VLAN). These choices have several implications in the specific field of application of the agricultural machines. The change of the access method, instead, focused on the adoption of a specific fieldbus, in order to grant deterministic access to the medium and reliability of communications for safety-relevant applications. After a survey, that will be reported, the Powerlink fieldbus was chosen and some modifications will be discussed in order to suit the scope of the research

Reserva de recursos em automotive ethernet

Mestrado em Engenharia Electrónica e TelecomunicaçõesIn recent years, automotive industry has undergone major changes, being able to highlight not only the growing development of electronic systems in increasingly and varied features and contexts, as well as to cope with its growing interaction between with the driver and the outside world. Due to the huge amount of traffic involved in these system communications, networking technologies used so far are starting to be less appealing and the industry began to consider alternatives, economically more competitive as is the case of Ethernet. The use of Ethernet technology in automotive domains faces some challenges, namely with time constraints compliance and well defined resource requirements. The emergence of AVB (Audio Video Bridging) protocols, is trying to tackle some of these problems of having dynamic Quality of Service management in automotive Ethernet networks. One example of such protocols is the signalling protocol (SRP Stream Reservation Protocol), which could be used for providing a resource reservation mechanism in an automotive Ethernet domain. To test the feasibility of such recent methods, simulation tools are of paramount importance. This work presents an implementation of the SRP (Stream Reservation Protocol) in Omnet++, taking into account some of its constraints. It is described the fundamental aspects of this model implementation, as well as some functional tests.Nos últimos anos, a industria automóvel tem sofrido grandes evoluções, podendo-se destacar não só o crescente desenvolvimento de sistemas eletrónicos em contextos e funcionalidades cada vez mais variados, como também a crescente interacção deste com o condutor e o mundo exterior. Devido ao enorme aumento de tráfego envolvido nas comunicações que compõem esses sistemas, as tecnologias de redes usadas até então deixaram de ser tão apelativas e passaram-se a considerar alternativas económicamente mais competitivas como é o caso da Ethernet. O uso de redes Ethernet em âmbito automóvel levanta alguns problemas, nomeadamente no cumprimento de limites temporais e requisitos de recursos bem definidos. O aparecimento de protocolos AVB (Audio Video Bridging) vem tentar colmatar vários problemas de gestão dinâmica de Qualidade de Serviço das redes Ethernet no domínio automóvel. O protocol de sinalização SRP (Stream Reservation Protocol) pode ser adaptado para redes Ethernet no contexto automóvel para proporcionar um mecanismo de reserva de recursos. Para testar a viabilidade de métodos tão recentes, as ferramentes de simulação são de uma importância vital. Este trabalho apresententa uma implemetação do protocolo SRP (Stream Reservation Protocol) em ambiente de simulação OMNeT++. São apresentados os aspectos fundamentais do modelo implemetado bem como alguns testes funcionais de validação deste

Real-Time Performance of Industrial IoT Communication Technologies: A Review

With the growing need for automation and the ongoing merge of OT and IT, industrial networks have to transport a high amount of heterogeneous data with mixed criticality such as control traffic, sensor data, and configuration messages. Current advances in IT technologies furthermore enable a new set of automation scenarios under the roof of Industry 4.0 and IIoT where industrial networks now have to meet new requirements in flexibility and reliability. The necessary real-time guarantees will place significant demands on the networks. In this paper, we identify IIoT use cases and infer real-time requirements along several axes before bridging the gap between real-time network technologies and the identified scenarios. We review real-time networking technologies and present peer-reviewed works from the past 5 years for industrial environments. We investigate how these can be applied to controllers, systems, and embedded devices. Finally, we discuss open challenges for real-time communication technologies to enable the identified scenarios. The review shows academic interest in the field of real-time communication technologies but also highlights a lack of a fixed set of standards important for trust in safety and reliability, especially where wireless technologies are concerned.Comment: IEEE Internet of Things Journal 2023 | Journal article DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2023.333250

Dynamic Quality-of-Service Management Under Software-Defined Networking Architectures

The Internet is facing new challenges emerging from new trends in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for example, cloud services, Big Data, increased mobile usage etc. Traditional IP networks rely in two design principles that, despite serving as an effective solution in the last decades, have become deprecated and not well fit for the new challenges. First, the control and data plane are tightly embedded in the networking devices and second, the structure is highly decentralized with no centralized point of management. This static and rigid architecture leaves no space for innovation with a consequence lack of scalability. Also, it leads to high management and operation costs. The SDN paradigm provides a more dynamic, manageable, cost-effective and adaptable architecture that is ready for the dynamic nature of today's applications. The goal of this thesis is a novel SDN-enabled solution that provides dynamic Quality of Service management for real-time and multimedia applications. This solution will be tested and implemented over a real, not-simulated testbed, composed by OpenFlow-enabled devices, the ONOS SDN controller and client terminals that produced/consume data streams. Furthermore, it is also expected to characterize and evaluate the benefits of the SDN-based solution against a traditional usage of the network (non-SDN)