Industrial Routers: The Why and Its Advantages

The use of routers in the industrial setting is a must. Obviously, they are equipment that must be adapted to the environment, that is why the power supplies, rail mounting housing, power range, temperatures and EMC must be the same as those of other contiguous equipment, ie industrial routhers. The router, due to the characteristics of Ethernet networks, is a basic element for the management, access security and optimization of the same. And in each case we will have to assess in its fair measure, which functions are the most appropriate. To highlight the option of firewalls, DSL, VPN and Dial-in and Dial-out.

Starting point: Industrial Ethernet

It is already known and accepted by all that Ethernet is a communication protocol that is increasingly present in the industrial field. Some of its best known industrial variants are Profinet, Ethernet / IP, ModBus / TCP ... depending on the manufacturer of the control equipment (PLC).

The final objective of any communication bus is to transmit data between the control/monitoring equipment (PLC or PC) and/or these with their remote slaves. But the control/monitoring equipment, in turn, must deliver/receive data from higher levels of process management control (SCADA among others).

Ethernet is being accepted as an industrial bus basically for the following reasons:

• It is already present in the industry, although not in the productive sphere, but in the management/office sphere.

• It offers much lower operating costs. (A single bus across the enterprise simplifies support staff, and support teams are cheaper by leveraging higher deployment/quantity technology.)

• The scalability, transparency and modularity of its architecture. It allows us to gradually implement a bus that is easily expandable, allows us to integrate new equipment with new and better features and is compatible with previous equipment.

• The industrialization of office automation equipment to the industrial requirements of voltage, EMC, robustness to vibrations, temperatures, etc.

Ethernet in the manufacturing industry

Up to this point we've outlined some of the whys and benefits that make Ethernet a huge trend in the industry. But we must delve a little deeper into typical industrial applications in the production and control field to appreciate some other advantages that are not so obvious at first glance.

In machine manufacturing, or in the control of production lines, one of the big issues is the maximum communication times (known as jitters) to ensure reliable and precise control of the machines/production lines. For all control, maximum reaction times must be ensured for the I/O. To do this, different manufacturers have adopted different strategies to deal with the situation. From synchronization to the creation of specific chips, all of them offer reliable solutions that the market will choose according to characteristics, the available offer or preferences.