2019/05/01 by Ahmad Khaliq, Sangeet Saha, Khaliq, Ahmad +7
Computer Science · Engineering · #Embedded Systems Design Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Industrial Automation and Control Systems #Network Time Synchronization Technologies #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1905.00247
openalex publication_date 2019/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Industrial automation has received a considerable attention in the last few\nyears with the rise of Internet of Things (IoT). Specifically, industrial\ncommunication network technology such as Profinet has proved to be a major game\nchanger for such automation. However, industrial automation devices often have\nto exhibit robustness to dynamically changing network conditions and thus,\ndemand a rigorous testing environment to avoid any safety-critical failures.\nHence, in this paper, we have proposed an FPGA-based novel framework called\nProfi-Load to generate Profinet traffic with specific intensities for a\nspecified duration of time. The proposed Profi-Load intends to facilitate the\nperformance testing of the industrial automated devices under various network\nconditions. By using the advantage of inherent hardware parallelism and\nre-configurable features of FPGA, Profi-Load is able to generate Profinet\ntraffic efficiently. Moreover, it can be reconfigured on the fly as per the\nspecific requirements. We have developed our proposed Profi-Load framework by\nemploying the Xilinx-based NetJury device which belongs to Zynq-7000 FPGA\nfamily. A series of experiments have been conducted to evaluate the\neffectiveness of Profi-Load and it has been observed that Profi-Load is able to\ngenerate precise load at a constant rate for stringent timing requirements.\nFurthermore, a suitable Human Machine Interface (HMI) has also been developed\nfor quick access to our framework. The HMI at the client side can directly\ncommunicate with the NetJury device and parameters such as, required load\namount, number of packet(s) to be sent or desired time duration can be selected\nusing the HMI.\n