Limits of increasing the performance of Industrial Ethernet protocols

The evolution of industrial communication inexorably moves to Industrial Ethernet networks. One important reason for using Ethernet at the shop floor is to participate on the continuous advancements of standard Ethernet. Thus it seems to be the logical next step to change the bit rate from Fast Ethernet to Gigabit Ethernet to achieve better performance. The question is, how the cycle time as a relevant performance metrics of industrial automation systems can profit from increasing the bit rate to 1 Gbps. Because of its importance for the industrial automation domain this paper focuses on line topology. The analysis is based on EtherCAT and PROFINET, which are two popular representatives of different architectures for high performance Industrial Ethernet networks.