As manufacturers move toward Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), common communication platforms are needed to achieve the next level of efficiency boost. Using common communication platforms, like Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), significantly reduces the burden of separate networks for IT and OT without compromising the separate requirements from both areas of the plant/enterprise.
TSN is the mother of all network protocols. It makes it possible to share the network bandwidth wisely by allocating rules of time sensitivity. For example, industrial motion control related communication, safety communication, general automation control communication (I/O), IT software communications, video surveillance communication, or Industrial vision system communication would need to be configured based on their time sensitivity priority so that the network of switches and communication gateways can effectively manage all the traffic without compromising service offerings.
If you are unfamiliar with TSN, you aren’t alone. Manufacturers are currently in the early adopter phase. User groups of all major industrial networking protocols such as ODVA (CIP and EtherNet/IP), PNO (for PROFINET and PROFISAFE), and CLPA (for CC-Link IE) are working toward incorporating TSN abilities in their respective network protocols. CC-Link IE Field has already released some of the products related to CC-Link IE Field TSN.
With TSN implementation, the current set of industrial protocols do not go away. If a machine uses today’s industrial protocols, it can continue to use that. TSN implementation has some gateway modules that would allow communicating the standard protocols while adding TSN to the facility.
While it would be optimal to have one universal protocol of communication across the plant floor, that is an unlikely scenario. Instead, we will continue to see TSN flavors of different protocols as each protocol has its own benefits of things it does the best. TSN allows for this co-existence of protocols on the same network.
