Experimental evaluation of PROFINET performance

In this paper PROFINET, the new industrial real-time Ethernet protocol, is considered. PROFINET has been designed to cover all sectors of distributed automation, from process control, to distributed I/O and to motion control. After an overview of Ethernet limitations, the different kinds of PROFINET are presented followed by experimental results. Authors have realized a test environment to achieve proper timing measure over a PROFINET network assembled with now available and future components. Preliminary results show that PROFINET Non-RT protocol can integrate existing fieldbus plant, whereas PROFINET RT Class 1 protocol has a good real-time behavior with cycle variability less than 10% even in high-loaded network condition.