TSN Update
How to "practice" TSN on a Linux platform SOURCE: ASIX
An easy way to enter the new generation Industrial Ethernet, Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) world is by connecting PCI Express TSN network card on an industrial computer. TSN network cards on Linux platforms can provide a convenient development and testing environment to verify enhanced TSN functionalities.
THE GLOBAL CORONAVIRUS (COVID-19) EPIDEMIC has continued to spread since Year 2019, COVID-19 lockdown had significantly affected the operating mode and working habits of manufacturing industry around the world, such as factory production drop, goods delivery limitation, travel restrictions, etc. The use of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) between human and machine is used to improve factory production efficiency and manufacturing quality. This marketing trend brings new opportunities to accelerate the development of smart factory industrial automation applications. The global strong smart manufacturing demands brings the rapid growth of Industrial Ethernet market shares compared to classic fieldbuses. Industrial Ethernet market shares (52%) have overtaken fieldbuses (42%) since Year 2018 according to HMS’ Industrial Network Market Shares Annual Reports. The newest HMS Industrial Network Market Shares 2020 Report mentioned “HMS Networks annual study of the industrial network market shows that Industrial Ethernet increases its market share to 64% of new installed nodes (59% last year), while fieldbuses drop to 30% (35).” It means the Industrial Ethernet market shares are going higher and the classis fieldbuses market shares are going lower every year.
Time Sensitive Networking (TSN)
The standard Ethernet with TCP/IP is non-deterministic communication and is not suitable for industrial automation applications. To support real-time, deterministic communications over Ethernet, the global industrial network manufacturers have developed different industrial Ethernet solutions, such as PROFINET, EtherCAT, EtherNet/IP, Modbus TCP, POWERLINK, SERCOS, CC-Link IE, etc., and these industrial Ethernet solutions have also been practiced on respective isolated industrial Ethernet networks in factory. These isolated industrial Ethernet
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networks can only be connected by using different industrial fieldbus gateways. For an Industry 4.0 smart manufacturing ecosystem, the smart factory cloud server should be able to collect and analyze all ecosystem information, such as engineering design sub-system, factory manufacturing sub-system, stocks and supply chain sub-system, etc. so manufacturers can maintain the engineering design, factory manufacturing, stocks and supply chains, etc. resources based the real customer demands more efficiently. To reach these requirements, manufacturers need converge the non-real-time IT (Information Technology) networks and real-time OT (Operation Technology) networks into a single network. It is hard for the traditional industrial Ethernet solutions, but the new generation industrial Ethernet, Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) technology can easily converge the IT and OT networks with real-time, deterministic, security communications. Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) technology is a set of IEEE 802.1 standards under development by the Time Sensitive Networking Task Group (TSN TG) of IEEE 802.1 Working Group. TSN is an OSI model Layer 2: Data Link Layer (DLL) communication technology so it can support hard real-time, deterministic and low latency communications over standard Ethernet. Different industrial automation machines have different industrial communication languages in factory. This problem cannot be improved by TSN technology. The Open Platform Communication Unified Architecture technology is a cross-platform machine-to-machine industrial communication protocol standard developed by the OPC Foundation based on the application layer of the OSI seven-layer model, which provides common industrial communication languages between different industrial automation machines. The combination of TSN with OPC UA, which provides the in d u s t r ial et h er ne t b o o k
04.2021
