New approach for improvements and comparison of high performance real-time ethernet networks

Real-Time Ethernet networks increasingly gain importance for the employment in industrial applications. Certain Real-Time Ethernet networks were optimized to reach very small cycle times well below 100 μs by modifying the Ethernet hardware. Two important and wide-spread systems of this class are EtherCAT and Profinet IRT. VABS is a newer high-performance system which is still under development. This study presents an objective performance comparison of the three systems. It turns out that both Profinet IRT and the summation frame based systems EtherCAT and VABS exhibit distinctive strengths and weaknesses. Profinet IRT gains the advantage with asymmetric inbound and outbound data payloads, but it runs behind EtherCAT and VABS for very small data-payloads.