Networking

Challenges of Industrial Networking

Industrial environment networking is different from traditional IT setups for two reasons:

1) The communications setup within industrial networking is constructed with relatively few layers and points of failure, which is an outgrowth of the fact that...

2) Communications must run continuously and with low latency to be useful, since the underlying control loops are extremely short and therefore communication cannot take more than a few fractions of a second.

Axilon's approach

Axilon’s platform is only viable if it does not introduce new points of failure at the networking layer—and the platform is designed with the above constraints in mind.

1) Axilon does not introduce failure points between lower level devices and primary systems because the software-defined networking daemon is built to be fault tolerant—meaning it “fails closed” or “fails safe.

If the daemon needs to be updated and stops working, communications continue uninterrupted between the lower level systems and the primary system(s). The daemon is only active in rerouting communications from the primary systems to the Axilon clone when necessary, but does not itself interfere with communications from lower-level devices to the primary system(s).

2) Axilon’s networking daemon has been tested to ensure that it does not introduce unacceptable delays into tight duty-loop environments. The daemon is built to be extremely low overhead in terms of packet processing.

Even when tested with the highest-overhead protocol transcoding times, internal testing has shown that the networking daemon only adds between 10-50 ms of overhead to packet transmission.