Design of an integrated fieldbus gateway

Fieldbuses are becoming more widely used to communicate among control devices in the automated production manufacturing environment. There are many fieldbus protocol standards, but the interoperability problem arises because they are not compatible among themselves. In this paper, we propose an integrated fieldbus network architecture based on Ethernet and design an integrated fieldbus gateway to integrate different fieldbus networks. The integrated fieldbus gateway allows a seamless delivery of control data among the control devices on the different fieldbus networks. We describe the structure of the integrated fieldbus protocol and the architecture and the functionality of the integrated fieldbus gateway.