PROFINET Basics - An Industrial Ethernet Protocol
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If you ever installed a printer at your office or a router at home, you probably used an Ethernet cable. Most people think “Ethernet” just means the cable type and leave it at that. But in fact, the cable only represents the physical part of Ethernet.
This cable has a series of communication protocols. You’ve heard of two of them, the Internet Protocol (IP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). For offices and homes, these two will suffice. With them, you have all you need for an office or home – file sharing, printer and email access, and of course, netsurfing.
However, an industrial plant has different needs. On the factory floor, controllers must access data in drive systems, input/output (I/O) devices, and workstations. And here you need super-fast responses, whereas in the office a user can wait. Finally, you have to protect against abrasion, moisture, temperature changes, even damaging chemicals.
So computer-type people cooked up a new Ethernet category, the Industrial Ethernet. Then more computer types based the PROFINET protocol on that. So let’s dig deeper and see how PROFINET works.