Real Time Distributed Control on Machines Over Quasi Deterministic Ethernet

The world of industry is at the gates of a big change in the standard of communications adoption; at the moment, CAN is the existing standard for distributed control and data exchange on agricultural, earthmoving and most industrial heavy-duty vehicles. Due to its limitations several workgroups are discussing for its replacement, the newly approach is to find a world-wide accepted standard, multi-vendor, low-cost network replacement, that could overcome such limitations. Ethernet can be considered as the main candidate for the CAN network replacement, and by now many manufacturers created new standards based on it, using libraries or ad-hoc hardware. This paper will describe a new low-cost approach, using Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components, to realize a quasi deterministic real-time Ethernet. The paper demonstrates that our approach offers some important advantages in respect of other solutions, ensuring a sufficient real time and a very good bandwidth.