High System Availability with IXXAT's Powerlink Stacks

A major safety feature for industrial communication is the continuous system availability, even if failures in essential components occur, e.g. in the communication master or in network connections (cables). To ensure a high system availability, the availability of the controller as well as of the network must be guaranteed.

For this reason, a highly available controller solution was considered for Powerlink at a very early stage, and was now specified in EPSG WDP 302 A and implemented by IXXAT.

Besides the primary Managing Node (MN), several redundant master devices can be operated in one network, which act like Controlled Nodes (CN).
The MN transmits cyclic messages to the CNs, to ensure the reliable detection of a controller outage within one communication cycle. In that case, one of the redundant masters is activated by using a priority algorithm and immediately continues the tasks of the broken MN.
The redundancy procedure is transparent for CN devices, so existing CNs can be used in highly available networks without adaptations.

A network redundancy is archived by using two independent network cables. All messages are transmitted on both lines in parallel to enable the message reception by the network nodes even with one broken cable.

The new version of the IXXAT Powerlink protocol software is implemented according to the Powerlink specification V 1.1.0 and is available as source code and as IP core for the development of highly performing Managing and Controlled Nodes based on a FPGA. The software is also implemented on the Industrial Ethernet Module from IXXAT. The extension package for the development of redundant managing nodes is optional available.

Due to the long-term experience in the area of Powerlink and due to the extensive collaboration within the technical working groups of the EPSG, IXXAT is the ideal development partner and supplier of components for Powerlink.