41 www.drivesncontrols.com March 2024 TALKING INDUSTRY n Trends in Network Connectivity Last month's Talking Industry* panel discussion covered many aspects of network connectivity, including trends in networking, the move to 5G private networks, and time-sensitive networking. Consultant editor Andy Pye, who chaired the session, reports. Talking Industry The guests on last month’s Talking Industry online discussion were a pair of experts in industrial networking: David Bradley-Foley, MD of HMS Networks; and John Browett, who manages the CC-Link Partner Association Europe. Each year, HMS releases a survey of trends in industrial networking technologies. The 2023 study revealed a 7% growth in the number of installed industrial communications nodes – machines or devices connected to eld networks – while revealing that users are increasingly running multiple networks. Industrial Ethernet is still the fastestgrowing technology and now accounts for 68% of the all newly installed nodes, but usage of well-proven eldbus technologies remains signicant and stable. The growth of wireless accelerated in 2023 as more wire-free industrial networking technologies were introduced in factory automation, though its share of the total market is still quite low. David Bradley-Foley explained that many existing wireless infrastructures are based on 2G or 3G technologies, with low bandwidths. Manufacturers are struggling to keep these networks running. 5G gives the exibility of 3G, but with a huge bandwidth. However, you cannot transmit over long distances with 5G. A fastreacting network is very important from a safety point of view when dealing with machinery and AGVs. Before 5G, wireless bridges on Ethernet networks weren’t able to do real-time communication because the bandwidth and the speed weren't there. Industrialists are now moving towards installing their own private 5G networks, the costs for which have come down from around £1m to around £100k. It is now quite feasible for companies to run their own private 5G networks. In terms of connecting legacy machines, 5G “bolts” are available to provide a 5G connection! Time-Sensitive Networking At the end of the 1990s, users and OEMs were calling for new, open standards instead of proprietary networking technologies, so they could network devices from di¢erent manufacturers. Industrial Ethernet with TimeSensitive Networking (TSN) capabilities is now widely accepted as an enabling network technology to support deterministic, convergent communications as the core of Industry 4.0 applications. In 2018, John Browett oversaw the launch of CCLink IE TSN in the European market – the rst open industrial Ethernet to combine gigabit bandwidth with TSN. There are now large CC-Link networks in divergent sectors of industry in Asia, Europe and North America. Browett explained that TSN arose from the need for broadcasters to deal with live broadcast signals. It was dened by a set of standards created by the IEEE. The idea is to provide a common timebase across a network, synchronising all of the devices together, so they all know what time it is. You can use the analogy of a running a railway network: the trains all have to make sure they get from one place to another for a given time. TSN is the same, except instead of being trains that are moving, it's packets of data, which are transferring between nodes on the network. The other missing piece of the puzzle is another standard, called QBV, which is a mechanism for assigning priority to di¢erent packets of data on a network. Safety would have a very high priority, whereas a camera sending video frames, say once a second, has a lower priority. QBV allows the same network to perform many di¢erent functions. In the past, you may have had one network for safety, another for motion control, and a third for cameras. With TSN, you can put all of this on one network, making machines simpler, less expensive, and faster to develop. n * Talking Industry is sponsored by the Drives & Controls exhibition, taking place from 5-6 June 2024 at the NEC in Birmingham, in association with Smart Manufacturing and Engineering Week 2024. www.drives-expo.com Available as a podcast If you missed this Talking Industry Webinar, it is available as an on-demand video on YouTube (https://youtu.be/-zbPboOXrcw) and also as a podcast (via https://talkingindustry.podbean.com) The online panel On the panel for this Webinar were: • David Bradley-Foley, Managing Director, HMS Networks, UK and Ireland • John Browett, General Manager, CC-Link Partner Association Europe • Andy Pye, Webinar Chair and Consultant Editor, DFA Media
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