POWERLINK and Real-time Linux: A perfect match for highest performance in real applications
Josef Baumgartner and Stefan Schönegger, B&R Automation, Austria
In the automation industry, many discussions around the various Industrial Ethernet concepts like POWERLINK, Profinet and EtherCAT are based on theoretical performance studies. This paper will outline the in-reality achievable performance of the open source POWERLINK technology operating on a standard x86 PC with real-time Linux and its potential application scenarios. The evaluation will include a study on the synchronization quality as well as on the resulting CPU load for large scale applications generated by the network protocol.