How can be minimize inter packet and switching latency in EtherCAT protocol? - microcontroller

I am trying to connect multiple microcontroller board(slave node) through a main supervisor(master node) via EtherCAT protocol. All the slave nodes will be connected through a switch. So, Is there any interpacket latency or switching latency in switching hub while exchanging the data to one switch port to another switch port? Is there any mechanism to improvise these latencies as minimal as possible?

What switch are you planning on using? Typically there is no need for a switch in an EtherCAT network as you can daisy chain the slave devices together. A slave device only adds about 1us of latency so this would be the best way to keep latency as minimal as possible. Is there a reason you can't daisy chain?

Related

Can an L2 switch send its MAC table data to another device/switch connected in the same network via a port?

My requirement is, there are four ethernet switches connected in a straight daisy chain manner. But no ring/loop is formed. To each switch's PHY ports, there are I/O modules connected. A main CPU is interfaced to the first switch.
My problem is how will the main CPU the location of these ports(I/O modules)? Is there a way to send the MAC table data to another device/switch connected in the same network via a port.
Thanks
Need any other possible ways to implement this.

NodeMCU broadcast to all clients

I want to broadcast a request to all client that are connected to my esp8266 12f access-point
I used this to create a connection per client, means if there're 3 clients it will create 3 connections.
for mac,ip in pairs(wifi.ap.getclient()) do
srv= net.createConnection(net.TCP, 0)
srv:on("receive", function(client, b_response) srv:close() collectgarbage() end)
srv:on("connection", function(client, b_request) client:send(request) end)
srv:connect(80, ip)
end
I tried the broadcast ip srv:connect(80, "255.255.255.255") but nothing was sent
The Problem :-
What I used that every srv will overwrite the previous srv so I can not get a response if it was delayed, even so I can name every srv with a different name like srv_1, srv_2, srv_3 but this take too much memory.
What I want
Create only one connection ?
Your code is using TCP, which is inherently a single connection, point-to-point protocol. There's no such thing as a "broadcast" TCP connection. TCP simply does not work using broadcast. That's like trying to use a car as a boat.
If you're sending a small amount of information, you might try UDP instead. The drawbacks are that UDP is unreliable - you can't be certain your message was received - and you'd need a lot more code to receive a response, if you want one, and you'd need to build a reliability mechanism (retransmit if no answer received, detect retransmissions in case the answer was dropped) if you care about that.
I'd recommend that you check out the MQTT protocol - it's designed to make it easy to communicate with multiple clients. It's lightweight and MQTT clients run well on NodeMCU and Arduino processors. There's an MQTT client built into NodeMCU's LUA implementation.
The downside is you'd need an MQTT broker that all of your NodeMCU's will connect to. The broker is usually run on a more capable processor (a Raspberry Pi is a good choice) or externally on the Internet (Adafruit offers a broker at https://io.adafruit.com/), although there are some implementations that run on an ESP8266.

Connecting Zynq boards in deterministic way

I'm trying to make a cluster with Zynq-7010 boards for a real-time application. One of them will be the master, and it will control eight client boards. The master board will also collect the data from clients. I tried to use 100Mbit ethernet connection to connect the nodes but it was not as fast as I need. In addition, it was not deterministic because of switch's indeterministic behavior. Could you give me some idea about how to connect them fast and deterministic way?
One way to speed it up is to use 1Gbit ethernet, which is supported by Zynq-7010, if you have an appropriate ethernet transceiver on the board.
If you have FMC connectors, you could use an FMC Ethernet board to enable the master to connect directly to 4 other boards to avoid the non-determinism of an ethernet switch.

How much additional load does a multicast subscriber impose on a switch?

If you have a switch with at least one subscriber to a multicast address, how much additional load would each additional subscriber add?
Example:
You have a 10G switch (with IGMP) with 10 servers and no other activity.
When Server1 subscribers to a 1G multicast feed, the switch will have 1G of load.
What would the load be after Server2 and Server3 subscribed?
Obviously traffic to the switch would not increase, but what about the switch's internal load?
Houw would the answer be different without IGMP?
The whole idea of multicast is that it is efficient. The presence of one subscriber downstream causes the switch to send an IGMP join request of its own upstream and pass incoming multicasts downstream, without duplication. The addition of further downstream subscribers has no effect at all except to increment an internal subscriber count for that group. When that goes back to zero it sends an IGMP leave request of its own upstream.
I don't know what you mean by 'without IGMP'. There is no such thing as UDP multicast without IGMP. It is a contradiction in terms.
Firstly, some background information for you.
The traditional definition of routers and switches are along the lines of:
Router: a device capable of routing a packet form one IP subnet to a different IP subnet
Switch: a device capable of switching a packet within the same IP subnet
However, this traditional definition no longer holds these days because we have switches that can route traffic from one IP subnet to another IP subnet and even perform complex operations such as QoS at wire speed.
Therefore it is often easier to redefine Routers and Switches as follows:
Router: a device that uses the CPU to route packets, often inspects parts of packets that are higher up the OSI layer.
Switch: a device with ASIC(s) (a.k.a switching chips) that switches/routes traffic at full wire speed. What this means is that if the switch has 24 1Gbps ports, it will be able to switch 24Gbps bi-directional traffic without dropping any packets.
Now, to answer your question, it is important to determine whether the ASIC in your switch is capable of handling multicast traffic or not. If so, adding "load" really isn't an issue, as long as you ensure that each switch port is not congested (e.g. 2Gbps of traffic trying to egress out of 1Gbps port). If the ASIC in your switch is NOT capable of handling multicast traffic, it is highly likely that the switch will simply send all multicast traffic up to the CPU. Then it would be up to the software to determine where each packet goes. CPUs on switches are not powerful, because their primary role isn't to route/switch packets, but to manage the switch (e.g. configure the ASIC so that packets get switched properly). Therefore, if your switch is sending packets up to the CPU, the switch will struggle. You won't get anywhere near 1Gbps of multicast via the CPU.
Without IGMP, switches, by default, will flood out the traffic on all ports. Again, this is not a problem for the switch itself because it can handle this at wirespeed. It may cause problems for other parts of the network because traffic is needlessly being duplicated.
The reason for this long answer is because the phrase "10G switch" in your example is quite misleading, and it led me to believe that you maybe thinking that a powerful CPU sits at the center of the switch that is capable of performing 10Gbps bi-directional switching. This is simply not the case, and talking about "load" on a switch therefore often makes little sense.
I hope this helps.

Simulate high speed network connection

I have created a bandwidth meter application to measure total Internet traffic. I need to test the application with relatively high data transfer rates, such as 4 Mbps. I have a slow Internet connection, so I need a simulator to test my application to see the behavior with high throughput rates.
As an option, you can run some HTTP server in one virtual machine with NAT'ed network adapter and test your bandwidth meter against it from the host system or a similar VM.
There are commercial packet generators that do this, and also a few freely available ones like PackETH and Bit-Twist.
There are also other creative solutions. For example, do the packets need to be IP packets for your purpose? If not, you could always get a "dumb" switch or hub (no spanning-tree or other loop protection) and plug a crossover cable into it. (or a straight-through Ethernet cable would work if the switch supports Auto-MDIX) The idea would be that with a loop in your network, the hub/switch will flood the network to 100% for you since it will continually re-forward the same packets.
If you try this, be sure yours is the only computer on the network, since this technique will effectively render it useless. ;-)
You could always send some IP broadcast packets to "seed" the loop. Otherwise, the first thing I think you'd likely see is broadcast ARP packets, which won't help if you're measuring layer 3 traffic only.
Lastly, (and especially if this sounds like too much trouble) I recommend you read up on dependency injection and refactor your code so you can test it without the need for a high-speed interface. Of course, you'll still need to test your code in a real high-speed environment, but doing this will give you much more confidence in your code.

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