Coupling of a Powerline Communication Modem to an Industrial Fieldbus Network

Abstract

In a broad and heterogeneous industrial communications environment, the need of having flexibility as well as maintaining the reliability and low cost has pushed the researchers to look for new possibilities and market opportunities to cover all the needs. Actual industrial systems are needed of at least two ways of inputs: power input, for the system operation, and data input for controlling, testing and administrating the system. The main restrictions, that actual systems and networks have, are low flexibility and, sometimes, considerable expenses in terms on maintenance. But also they have advantages, e.g. low response time, high reliability, wide and highly known architecture etc. In this background, grows the thought of increasing the flexibility without impacting such important aspects as response time or reliability. On the industrial communication protocols, Ethernet POWERLINK standard is one of the existing protocols in the market. Ethernet POWERLINK is a real-time industrial communication protocol based on Ethernet standard, which is used for controlling and commanding several sensors and actuators with high speed, time-synchronization and reliability, minimizing the global system latency. The main aim of this project is to reach a balanced solution by joining both power and data inputs in just one cable that allows an increase in the flexibility, as well as decrease in the maintenance costs, restraining the response time and achieving compatibility with a wide spread standard as is Ethernet.