MOXA is a leader in edge connectivity, industrial computing, and network infrastructure solutions for enabling connectivity for the Industrial Internet of Things. With over 30 years of industry experience, Moxa has connected more than 71 million devices worldwide and has a distribution and service network to serve customers in more than 80 countries.

Traditionally, different equipment, interfaces, and protocols presented serious challenges to transmitting, receiving, and processing large amounts of data in a timely manner for industrial automation applications. TSN overcomes these challenges by enabling time synchronization on the network so that all connected devices share a common time reference for all data to become available at a given point in time for specific tasks. These TSN-enabled systems are highly reliable as built-in bounded low latency in a deterministic networking environment optimizes performance and security.

To achieve a high level of reliability, IEEE 802.1CB Frame Replication and Elimination for Reliability (FRER) works to send duplicate copies of each frame over multiple disjoint paths, so even in the event of partial network failure, proactive redundancy still allows for seamless communication. During Taipei automation 2022, Moxa partnered with NXP Semiconductors N.V., a Dutch semiconductor designer and manufacturer and port Industrial Automation GmbH, to test the reliability of an 802.1CB-based ring topology that used Moxa switches to connect NXP equipment. As engineers unplugged certain network cables to simulate network failure, the data packets that controlled the critical equipment still synchronized and operated normally. Moreover, this test also demonstrated that robust network redundancy helps recover multiple points of failure, not just a single point of failure.

Another important step toward implementing TSN in industrial automation is to ensure the data can be transmitted in wireless applications. As a lot of industrial equipment is mobile, true IIoT will not be possible without a wider array of TSN wireless applications. In Taipei Automation 2021, Moxa, Intel, and port Industrial Automation GmbH developed a platform that demonstrates the industry’s first ready-to-use, application-to-application TSN solution for instant transmission of data.

Designed to be compatible with various communication protocols, the new platform is flexible and expandable, which means it can be used to build a next generation of smart manufacturing and logistics solutions, particularly when mobile devices are not only desired but required in real-world use cases. Wireless TSN fleshes out the full potential of TSN as a truly unified and high-performance network infrastructure that allows all types of traffic to coexist.

Read the whole article: https://www.automation.com/en-us/articles/january-2023/moxa-time-sensitive-networking-manufacturing