| Understanding Industrial Ethernet standards by Ron Groulx Feb09 |
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Understanding Industrial Ethernet standards By Ron Groulx When working in the design and installation of an industrial network, technicians often find themselves facing a bewildering array of standards written by numerous international, regional, national and trade organizations. The foundation for ensuring successful plan, installation and maintenance of an Ethernet network is an understanding of the key standards in use today and their applications. Ethernet standards used in industrial environments are more complex and stringent than those in office environments. That is because the mission-critical control-based applications traffic carried on an industrial network demands extremely high reliability with deterministic timing. In production environments there is far less tolerance for any excess latency that can lead to slowdowns or even breakdowns. Besides the standard throughput and performance issues, there are specific standards also address the extra stresses of harsh environments such as vibration, electrical noise, equipment in motion, impact dangers, and all manner of contaminants. Finally, standards play an important role in ensuring application backward-compatibility with legacy systems—a key factor in any industrial implementation. Cutting through the confusion  Given
the myriad of factors to consider, getting a handle on industrial
Ethernet standards can be extremely confusing and challenging. For
example, the standards that apply to designing cabling components or
networks for commercial and industrial Ethernet include ISO/IEC 11801,
the ANSI/TIA 568 series, ISO/IEC 24702, IEC 61158-1, - 2, IEC 61784-1,
-2, and ANSI/TIA 1005 apply. When planning and installation of the
physical infrastructure for industrial Ethernet automation networks,
technicians need to apply ISO/IEC 14763-2, IEC 61918, and 61784-5
standards to ensure robustness, compatibly, and maintainability.While this all seems overwhelming, proper education and training can help sort through the confusion. A good place to start is gaining an understanding of the various technical committees, their areas of focus and their standards. Table 1 provides a basic outline of those committees and their areas of focus. In addition to ISO, IEC and TIA, there are other regional cabling standards groups—including CSA (Canadian Standards Association)—that develop specifications for their geographic area or country. These regional standards are usually in harmony with ISO, IEC, and TIA requirements. |
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