Real Time Control on Firewire

Abstract

The goal of this project is to get insight into the use of Firewire as a field bus for real-time control. A characterization of Firewire's asynchronous transmission has been made by testing the point-to-point roundtrip in a 3-node Firewire network.\ud The results show Firewire's asynchronous transmission between 2 PC/104 stacks, using FCP (Functional Control Protocol) as the way of implementing, can transfer data in an average latency between 100¿s and 140μs, depending on the data payload. The maximum variation in this latency is 20μs.\ud During this project, it is also found that while the payload is increased, the roundtrip time does not show a significant increase: it rises only around 40μs from 1byte payload to 449 bytes payload. So the bus is used most efficiently when the packet is fully loaded. To get a complete insight of Firewire, it is recommended to implement Firewire¿s isochronous transmission and examine its applicability for real-time control also. And to use Firewire as a field bus in a real distributed control system with a plant is also advised to get a better understanding of Firewire