Enhancing Performance in FieldBus Communication Systems

The paper deals with the problem of communication in centralized medium access control FieldBus systems. These systems have the advantage of always guaranteeing the time constraints of periodic processes, due to the pre-scheduling based management. The time constraints of asynchronous processes (e.g. alarms, database queries, etc.) may not be respected, as they are subordinated to the amount of bandwidth dedicated to the periodic flow. The paper presents a management policy for periodic traffic which allows the asynchronous time-constraints to be respected and enhanced. The policy proposed is modelled and simulated. The results given show the improvement in performance that can be obtained by using the policy