Comunicações Industriais

Industrial Communications

Lecture 3 – Basic communication concepts

Luís Almeida
lda@fe.up.pt
 Previous lecture

• History of industrial computing architectures

– Focus on industrial networks

• The CIM architecture

• The benefits of distributed Data size

architectures requirements
Plant control
64KB Continuous- (non-real-time)
• The real-time requirements media
(soft real-time)
256B
• Typical requirements of Cell control Machine /
the severeal layers of the (hard/soft real-
time)
device
CIM architecture
16B Machine / configuration
process control and monitoring
(hard/soft (non-real-time)
1B real-time)

1ms 10ms 100ms 1s Max. delay

requirements

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 This lecture

• Basic concepts of networks and time

– Messages, packets and transactions

– Communication latency and its jitter
– Throughput vs timeliness
– Time in a distributed system

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 The network in a DS

• The network is a fundamental component in a distributed system (DS)

supporting all the interactions among nodes

• Thus, it is also a critical resource since loss of communication, results in

the loss of all global system services

Distributed System Node 2

Network
Node 1
Node n Node 3

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 But what is a network?

• Physical infrastructure ?
– Wiring
– Connectors
– Networking equipment

OR
• Communication system ?
– Physical infrastructure plus
– Network access interfaces
– Protocol stack
Preferred
definition for
“networkers”
Supports a system-wide vision
that facilitates reasoning about
the interplay between all
communicating nodes.

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 Network interfaces

• The network extends up to the Communication Network Interface (CNI)

that establishes the frontier between communication system and the node
host processor (kopetz, 1997)

Computing node
Protocol stack
Host Local
processor resources
CNI
Communication
Comm.
system
controller
Network connection
Network wiring

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 Purpose of the network

• To deliver communication services to the requesting nodes (i.e., to

transport messages from the CNI of a sender node to the CNI of a
receiver node) reliably, securely, efficiently and (for a real-time network)
timely !

CNI
Node A
Node B
Network

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 Messages

• Interactions in a DS are supported by message passing

• A message is a unit of information that is to be transferred, at a given

time, from a sender process to one or more receiver processes

• Contains both the respective data as well as the control information that
is relevant for the proper transmission of the data (e.g. sender,
destination, contents).
234ret
data 3err
Sdfsd
sender wererert
zxcxcvb

destination

Int+PreaAdd+Typ Data CRC ID DLC Data CRC EOF+Int

12+8B 6+6+2B 46-1500B 4B 11/29+1 bits 6 bits 0-64 bits 15 bits 11+3 bits
Ethernet CAN

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 Transactions

• A network transaction is the sequence of actions within the

communication system required to accomplish the
effective transfer of a message’s data.

• A transaction might include the transfer of messages carrying protocol

control information, only. These are referred to as control messages.

• A multi-message transaction is atomic when all its messages must be

transmitted without interruption.
Control mesg
control data
Mesg with
time effective data
Network-transaction

WorldFIP
Master poll
Slave answer

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 Transactions

• Many networks automatically break large messages in smaller packets

(fragmentation/reassembly).

• In that case, a message transaction includes several elementary network

transactions that correspond to the transfer of the respective packets.

• A packet is the smallest unit of information that is transmitted without

interruption (when there is no risk of confusion we will use message and
packet interchangeably).

Elementary network transactions

Packet 0 Packet 1 ... Packet n

time
Message-transaction

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 Transactions

• The data efficiency of the network protocol can be defined as the ratio
between the time to transmit effective data bits and the total duration
of the respective transaction.

data tx_time
Data_eff =
transaction duration
• In general:
The shorter the data per transaction,
the lower the efficiency is

control data

control data

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 The temporal characterisation of a transaction

activation release termination

Respective exchanges
Ready Executing time

Response time
Waiting for Effective
bus free bus use

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 Network delays

queuing – qA network load

Node A dequeuing – qB
Network
Node B
access – d a
transmission – d t

tA1 tA2 tA3 tA4 tA5 time

tA1 tA2 tA3 tA4 tA5 time
tB1 tB2 tB3 tB4 tB5
tBi – tAi = di , network-induced delay
Reception instants may suffer
di = qAi i
+ da + dt + i qBi , delay components irregular delays due to interferences
from the network load, queuing policies
di – di–1 = ji , delay jitter and processor load

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 Delay and delay jitter

• Network induced delay – extra delay caused by the transmission of data

over the network.
– Some applications (e.g. control) are particularly sensitive to this

tA1 tA2 tA3 tA4 tA5 time

tB1 tB2 tB3 tB4 tB5

• Delay jitter – variation affecting the network delay.

– Some applications (e.g. streaming) are not much affected by the network
delay but are highly affected by delay jitter

tA1 tA2 tA3 tA4 tA5 time

tB1 tB2 tB3tB4 tB5

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 Burstiness and buffering

• Burstiness – measure of the load submitted to the network in a short

interval of time.
– Bursts have a profound impact on the real-time performance of the
network and impose
high buffering requirements.
File transfers are a frequent cause of bursts.

burst time

• Buffer requirements – Buffer capacity needed to hold packet bursts.

– Too few buffers may lead to packet losses

Node A

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 Throughput and arrival / dep. rate

• Throughput – average amount of data, or packets, that the network

dispatches per unit of time (bit/s and packets/s).

• Arrival / departure rate – long-term rate at which data arrives at/from

the network (bit/s and packets/s).

Throughput 
( s i, r i ) time Network capacity
( so , r o ) time

ri
offered load

burstiness rate burstiness rate

Arrival Departure
si (s,r)-model
time (Cruz, 1991)

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 Throughput versus timeliness

• Throughput equates to speed, e.g., average number of packets delivered

per unit of time

• Timeliness is related to the instant of executing certain computations

(not directly related to speed!)

• Timeliness is highly influenced by the scheduling of activities in

the system,
i.e., when several packets are ready for transmission, which is sent first?

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 Worst-case versus average-case

• Remember the case of the man that drowned crossing a river

with average depth of 20cm!!

Average depth

Worst-case depth

• Average response times to events can be short but a sequence of

late handled events can turn a system unmanageable and lead to a
critical failure (timing failure), e.g., feedback control applications.
– In real-time systems, late results can
» Be useless or even cause catastrophes (Hard real-time)

» Just cause a degradation of QoS (Soft real-time)

– Importance of the worst-case delays!

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 Time across a network

• As opposed to a centralized system, in a distributed system

each node has its own clock

• Without specific support, there is no explicit coherent notion of time

across a distributed systems

• Worse, due to drift, clocks tend to permanently diverge

Network Node
Node
5h30 12h15
1s(A)

All clocks evolve at their own pace!

time_A Node There is no relative phase control
among periodic streams
5h19
time_B
1s(B)

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 Time across a network

• However, a coherent notion of time can be very important for several

applications to:
– Carry out actions at desired time instants
e.g. synchronous data acquisition, synchronous actuation
– Time-stamp data and events
e.g. establish causal relationships that led to a system failure
– Compute the age of data
– Coordinate transmissions
e.g. TDMA clock-based systems
– etc.

• But how to synchronize the clocks across the network?

– Clock synchronization algorithms!
NTP, SNTP, PTP (IEEE1588 → IEEE802.1AS…)…
– To be revisited later on...

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 Summary:

• The network is the kernel of a distributed system

• Transmits messages by means of network transactions

• Network delay & delay jitter

• Throughput vs timeliness

• Worst-case vs average-case

• Time in a DS – need for clock synchronization

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