The Industrial Internet Consortium said that it is expanding its testbed for time-sensitive networking after completing five plugfests and receiving feedback from its members that the TSN testbed was the most strategically valuable.
IIC is expanding its TSN testbed to Europe, after establishing the site at a Bosch Rexorth development site for internet of things control and communications in Erbach, Germany. An IIC plugfest was held there in mid-March, and the IIC says the expansion of the TSN testbed will let more companies participate; the testbed is “enabling the early phase usage of enhancements to Ethernet standards IEEE 802.1 and IEEE 802.3,” IIC added.
The TSN testbed’s core capabilities include time synchronization; sending scheduled traffic flows; and central, automated system configuration, according to IIC. The organization has nearly two dozen testbed focused on various aspects of the industrial IoT, from smart water or energy management to edge intelligence. The testbed projects are a combination of short-term, medium-term (12 to 24 months) and long-term (24 to 60 months) initiatives to enable IIC member companies to validate their IoT technologies. At the group’s most recent meeting, members presented on and ranked those test beds in terms of strategic value, with the TSN testbed coming out on top.
Prior to the plugfest at the new site, IIC held a TSN plugfest in Austin, Texas, at the NI Industrial IoT lab in early March. That event focused on communicating input and output traffic via TSN; demonstrating its ability to “protect critical flows from high-bandwidth traffic”; synchronizing devices to common time over the network; and establishing TSN network flows between vendors, according to IIC.
TSN testing has been on the upswing over the past year. The University of New Hampshire’s Interoperability Lab added three consortia in late 2016, that focused on time-sensitive networking needs in automotive, industrial and professional audio-visual. The lab noted at the time that the need for low-latency operations in autonomous vehicles and advanced driver assistance systems was driving TSN demand.
IIC said results from the most recent plugfest will be highlighted at its booth and the OPC Foundation booth at the Hannover Messe industrial conference in Germany later this month.
According to IIC, participating companies in the TSN Testbed include IIC members Analog Devices, Belden/Hirschmann, Bosch Rexroth, B&R Industrial Automation, Cisco, Hilscher, KUKA, National Instruments, Renesas Electronics, Schneider Electric, SICK AG, TTTech and Xilinx; as well as additional participants Calnex, Ixia, ISW–Stuttgart University and Phoenix Contact. IIC said that some of them will also have TSN displays at the HMI event.
