Title: Common protocol to support disparate communication types within industrial Ethernet environments

Authors: Jacqueline MacPherson; Maurice Dawson

Addresses: Department of Computer Science, College of Engineering and Computer Science, Colorado Technical University, 4435 N. Chestnut St., Colorado Springs, CO 80907, USA ' Department of Information Systems, College of Business Administration, University of Missouri-St. Louis, 228 ESH, One University Blvd, St. Louis, MO, USA

Abstract: Owing to the increasing demand for reliable products built globally, and through the evolution of machine design, the need for improved and a common communications protocol in different geographical regions has intensified. In this paper, the goal is to reveal that the current protocols used to support disparate communication types in manufacturing have caused complexity in configurations and an increase in monetary overhead for industrial system designers and the end users. Through the simulation of an industrial network, the packet timing, and packet loss between peer-to-peer systems, similar protocol systems will be compared with two dissimilar protocols systems to establish the thesis. The internal validation research method used in this study will reveal the need for an all-inclusive protocol to eliminate the timing and packet loss issues, the systems' configuration complexities, and the need to reduce the monetary overhead currently associated with the machine communications.

Keywords: common protocols; industrial system design; packet timing; peer-to-peer networks; P2P networks; industrial Ethernet; communications protocols; different regions; manufacturing industry; simulation; packet loss; machine communications.

DOI: 10.1504/IJNS.2016.077218

International Journal of Network Science, 2016 Vol.1 No.2, pp.134 - 154

Received: 25 Jul 2015
Accepted: 01 Nov 2015
Published online: 24 Jun 2016 *

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