Timing Evaluation of Cascaded Industrial Communication Networks

Wireless extensions of time-critical industrial communication systems could provide many benefits including increased flexibility and mobility. Moreover, they might enable completely new manufacturing solutions. On the other hand, seamless integration to the existing infrastructure and high performance with minimal increase of latency and jitter are key requirements. A wireless network with these features is developed in the project ParSec. Here, especially the MAC layer design and the gateway concepts between the existing Industrial Ethernet solutions and the wireless ParSec system are improved. In this paper, we show the ParSec system's proof of concept using typical industrial components. In the experimental evaluation, low round-trip times and low jitter were measured that satisfy the majority of industrial requirements.