A generic modulation sublayer for low level industrial fieldbus communications systems

Currently available low level industrial fieldbus communications systems face the challenge of continuously increasing requirements. The number of subscribers on the sensor and actuator level of such machine-to-machine (M2M) communications keeps growing due to an increasing degree of automation, hence, a higher amount of information needs to be transmitted. In addition to that the desired duration of the time interval is decreasing, in which data is exchanged with each subscriber in the network. To meet these demands in the future, modern modulation and coding principles need to be adopted. We propose a generic modulation sublayer (MSL) under the incorporation of the specific properties of low level industrial automations. These are, for example, hard real-time requirements, a large amount of possible subscribers and a guaranteed very high data integrity. In particular the latter is very challenging, since conventional techniques for short messages typically offer a high data integrity only with a poor data throughput. For this purpose we propose a novel concept of combined error correction and error detection, that highly outperforms conventional approaches without significantly increasing the complexity. Finally, we provide several simulation results as well as various methods of how to evaluate the MSL partially or completely in both software and hardware in order to approve its performance.