Analysis and Design of a Guaranteed Real Time Performance Enhanced Industrial Ethernet

Industrial Ethernet is a new trend in technology designed to replace the traditional industrial solutions such aspoint to point and field bus systems. The paper aims studying Industrial Ethernet performance under hard real time systemconditions. Substation automation system is chosen to be the environment in which Industrial Ethernet was assumed to beinstalled. OPNET package is used to simulate the behavior of such a system. From running the simulation model, the differentparameters affecting the system performance were determined. Three solutions are presented to enhance real timeperformance of Industrial Ethernet. First of all, the negative effect of FTP transfer to an industrial node is solved using a newmethod called FTP traffic shaping which is presented to enhance the performance of the system while keeping the same nodesperformance. The second direction is to enhance nodes operation using multicasting/VLAN techniques. The third motivation isstudying the effect on non real time traffic flowing between non industrial nodes on the system behaviour; different techniqueswere suggested to enhance the network performance and a modified Etherchannel switch architecture is proposed.