Time-Sensitive Networking

At Han­nover Messe 2018, Siemens show­cas­ing a trade fair mod­el to demon­strate the advan­tages of Time-Sen­si­tive Net­work­ing (TSN): TSN enables even more robust and reli­able Eth­er­net com­mu­ni­ca­tion between machines and plants even under high net­work load con­di­tions. The mod­el uses OPC UA Pub­Sub (Publisher/Subscriber) togeth­er with TSN for machine-to-machine (M2M) com­mu­ni­ca­tion. The reli­a­bil­i­ty of TSN pro­vides sig­nif­i­cant advan­tages for automa­tion appli­ca­tions in indus­tries such as auto­mo­tive, mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing and food&beverage. The first Siemens prod­ucts are expect­ed to be avail­able towards the end of 2018: net­work com­po­nents, com­mu­ni­ca­tion proces­sors, soft­ware and net­work man­age­ment with TSN functionality.
The mod­el applies the advan­tages of OPC UA with TSN: TSN com­bines the exist­ing stan­dards and opti­mizes Eth­er­net with an extend­ed Qual­i­ty of Ser­vice (QoS) mech­a­nism, time syn­chro­niza­tion, low trans­mis­sion laten­cies and seam­less redun­dan­cy. Users plac­ing heavy demands on reli­able com­mu­ni­ca­tion will ben­e­fit par­tic­u­lar­ly from the out­stand­ing advan­tages of QoS pri­or­i­ti­za­tion: The reser­va­tion of a par­tic­u­lar band­width and pre­dictable laten­cy peri­ods ensures that each appli­ca­tion is giv­en the com­mu­ni­ca­tion facil­i­ties it requires. The mod­el also demon­strates the coex­is­tence of TSN com­mu­ni­ca­tion and stan­dard Eth­er­net com­mu­ni­ca­tion, where­by data is trans­mit­ted from the con­troller via a com­mu­ni­ca­tion proces­sor into MindSphere.
TSN has now reached the required degree of tech­ni­cal matu­ri­ty (includ­ing stan­dards), and the first com­po­nents are avail­able as a hard­ware basis. Siemens and oth­er man­u­fac­tur­ers are now able to extend their exist­ing indus­tri­al net­works to include new applications.