Fieldbus & Industrial Networking


Maximising network availability

August 2003 Fieldbus & Industrial Networking

The use of the term 'redundancy' in the communications context was primarily introduced by the mathematician and electrical engineer, Claude E. Shannon. It is not the amount of information that is increased, but the probability that the information reaches the recipient. For the industrial network this finding is of fundamental significance.

If a message does not reach a recipient in an office environment, this error can be corrected by sending the message again later. In the industrial environment this same error can have serious consequences. If, for instance, a robot on a production line does not receive the necessary information for several minutes, or even for a few seconds, the entire production line may be affected. In certain circumstances it could mean the line stops.

Hirschmann has developed the Hiper-Ring (for Ethernet networks) based on the concept of the Spanning Tree Protocol. The Hiper-Ring significantly increases the availability of the network and facility, while with Spanning Tree, 30 seconds typically elapse before the failure of a link is compensated, with Hiper-Ring this takes less than half a second. The structure is considerably simplified, as only one additional cable is necessary for Hiper-Ring. Also of interest is the possibility of expansion. A recovery time of a maximum of 500 ms is guaranteed for topologies with up to 50 switches that support the Hiper-Ring concept. The maximum possible distance between two devices is 70 km. Optical ports are available for covering larger distances, which means that the rapid switchover time of 500 ms is made possible for networks covering considerably more than 3000 km.



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