Design and evaluation of a fieldbus protocol over IPv6

This paper presents design and evaluation of fieldbus which can support IPv6. Although IPv6 is the subsequent version of IPv4, there is no compatibility between them. Many kinds of fieldbus protocols work on IP, but they are designed on IPv4. IPv6 can provide some advanced features, which is useful for fieldbus. Therefore, it is useful to consider the adaptation of each fieldbus to IPv6 and the co-existence of IPv6 and IPv4 based fieldbus. This paper explains the experiments used to provide interoperability among IPv6 based field devices and among IPv6 based and IPv4 based field devices. The authors concluded that the IPv6 adaptation design deeply depends on the co-existence scenario. Additionally, a simple principle of binding fieldbus protocol stack instance to only one of IPv4 or IPv6 makes the solution easier. The authors choose FOUNDATION Fieldbus HSE for this work since it is the representative of IP Based fieldbus protocols.