What is industrial switch?

    An industrial switch is a cost-effective Industrial Ethernet communication solution designed to meet the needs of flexible industrial applications. As our commonly used LAN hardware equipment, industrial switch is widely loved by everyone. This device is widely used mainly because of the popularity of Ethernet. As the main equipment of local area network, it is used by almost all local area networks. Next, we will introduce the application of industrial switch in the field of industrial communication, let's have a look! 

    Industrial switch is a kind of switch based on Ethernet, which can transfer data in LAN. Ethernet is a network protocol that uses a shared bus to transmit media. The structure of an Ethernet switch is that each interface is directly connected to the host and generally can work in full duplex mode. The switch can connect many pairs of ports at the same time, so that each pair of hosts can communicate with each other as an exclusive medium for data transmission without conflict. In the following network architecture, a star topology is used, so a switch is required. All the computers are connected to each other by cables to industrial switches.

Primitive star networks used hubs as the standard for connecting devices, but such devices had some drawbacks, such as bandwidth sharing and port conflicts. Because Ethernet is a conflicting network, only two nodes can communicate with each other in a conflicting domain. In addition, although the hub has many ports, its internal structure is entirely ethernet-based“Bus architecture.”. This means that it has only one internal communication“Channel” to transmit data. If a hub device is used, the other ports have to wait while the nodes between ports 1 and 2 communicate. It takes 10 minutes to transfer data between nodes connected on different ports using the same hub. If there is another set of nodes using other ports of the hub for data transmission, this can lead to conflicts, resulting in longer transmission times, which can take up to 20 minutes to complete. Simply put, the more ports that hubs connect to, the more conflicts they have and the longer it takes to transfer data.

The physical characteristics of industrial switches include appearance features, physical connection types, port configurations, base types, expansion capabilities, stacking capabilities, and indicator light settings, these reflect the basic situation of the switch.

It is a kind of switch product that can simplify, reduce the cost, improve the performance and the port density, it belongs to the complex bridging technology embodied in Layer 2 of the OSI reference model. Switches, like bridges, are simple devices that forward information based on the MAC address in each packet. Routers typically make decisions based on basic information, such as destination addresses in Baotou, but not other, deeper information hidden in the packet. Unlike a bridge, a switch has a very low forwarding delay, which is close to the performance of a single LAN and far exceeds the forwarding performance of a conventional bridging Internet network. 

Switching technology makes it possible to share bandwidth between shared and private lans in order to alleviate the bottleneck of information transmission between lans. There are already switches with Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Fiber Distributed Data Interface (FDDI) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM-RRB- technology on the market. Using specially designed integrated circuits, switches can forward information at line speed on all ports simultaneously. It provides better performance than traditional bridges. 

With application-specific integrated circuit technology, the switch can maintain the performance over a larger number of ports at a lower cost per port than a traditional bridge. Industrial switches are widely used in various industries, including coal mine safety, rail transit, factory automation, water treatment systems, urban security and so on.

From: bbs.gongkong.com