Industrial Communication Systems

13-1

13.1 Introduction

e past two decades have brought tremendous advances in network technology, both in the oce world

and in all elds of automation. Two obvious indicators for this are on the one hand the stunning success

of the Internet, whose technological principles have also widely been adopted in small-size local area net-

works (LANs). On the other hand, the lengthy and erce struggle for an acceptable compromise in eldbus

standardization shows that the automation domain is seen as an important market by the big players.

Consequently, as networking in both worlds has reached a mature point, the recent years have seen many

attempts ...