Main field of research and application part of master thesis are the real situations known in today's industry, more precisely automation industry. We are facing 4th industry revolution (Industry 4.0), which is happening on this field. As described in preface, this revolution is actually consequence of rapid development of so called smart devices, which common thing is internet connectability, what we call Internet of Things. One of the important parts of this new revolution is converging of ethernet networks. I.e. plant, production and business network into one big-enterprise network. This converging brings many advantages and also disadvantages, which we are able, with smart and thoughtful design, minimize to a really low level. Heart of the thesis are industrial ethernet networks and for that used ethernet protocols. This is upgraded in a way of network architecture design, which is a good foundation for the upcoming applicative part, where 5 main industrial ethernet protocols are described, analyzed and compared. The contribution of this comparison is to easily see what are the advantages or disadvantages of each protocol, which standards it supports and finally if it is ready for the future.
The second part of these thesis is dedicated to the applicable part, which is based on Rockwell Automation equipment. This equipment for industrial ethernet communication uses Ethernet/IP protocol, which was tested in real application on previously mentioned equipment, where two configurations were used. One simple and one complex. First goal was to test and analyze the traffic on test configuration and achieve better organization of traffic. Second goal was to check prioritization functionality influence onnetwork traffic, what was also demonstrated on equipment in test.
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