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[RE] RTE summary paper



For those of you who haven't already seen it, there's an interesting "Real-Time Ethernet" summary paper at <www.felser.ch/download/FE-TR-0507.pdf>.  It is an invited IEEE paper by Max Felser.  It was published in June 2005.

ABSTRACT
After more than ten years of experience with applications of fieldbus in automation technology, the industry starts to develop and adopt Real-Time Ethernet (RTE) solutions. There already exists now more than ten proposed solutions. IEC
standards are trying to give a guideline and selection criteria based on recognized indicators for the user.
...
SUMMARY – CONCLUSION
The automation technology user would like to see just one standard solution for industrial Ethernet. At the moment, it looks like that there will be one standard document IEC 61784-2 which specifies at least ten different and most of them incompatible technical solutions for Real-Time Ethernet (see Table II). Some of the proposed protocols are just defined and no products exist at the moment. With others, there are already products and applications available. There is in fact no technical reason to have so many different realizations for Real-Time Ethernet. Reducing the number of solutions for the convenience and benefits of the end-users is a focus of on going discussions.
At the moment of writing this paper, the definitions of different classes of applications and possible Communication Profiles is not finished. As presented in this paper, in principle, one could live with a set of about three different solutions for all possible applications. Is it up to the end-user and the market to decide which one of the proposed solutions fulfils the requirements of the automation applications and will end up in real applications!

Chris Travis