Understanding DeviceNet Network Bandwidth Utilization and

Inter Scan Delay

Basic DeviceNet Operation for polled devices.
A. The master will try to send all of its poll / data packets to all of the slave devices in order of node number.
B. Slave devices respond with poll responses to the master as fast as they can, based on the operational
characteristics of the slave electronics. Slave poll responses have a higher priority on the network,
so the slave responses case the !aster to te!porarily sspend it"s polling.
#. When the master sends the last polling packet to the last slave, it starts an internal Inter Scan elay timer
!IS". The purpose of the Inter Scan elay is to provide a scheduled I#$ time on the network.
D. %dditional Slave poll responses will be sent after the final master poll. These residual slave poll
responses, or, I& residue, occur in the Interscan elay time, consuming I#$ time and preventing other
lower priority packets !scanlist upload / download, browsing" from being sent.
$. When the Inter Scan elay timer reaches its preset value, the master begins polling again. The entire
time from beginning of master polling to the end of the IS is the total network scan time.
In the above e'ample the master sends () bytes of data !) packets" to each slave. $ach slave responds with ()
bytes of data !) packets". The response time is determined by the slaves operating system.
%t a network speed of *+,- bits per second it takes appro'imately ..,) mS to transmit () bytes of data.
The final two poll responses would take appro'imately */ mS to complete. If the Inter Scan elay for the network
was set to */ mS there would be little to no I#$ time left for low priority messages. The Interscan delay will need
to be set higher than the default value of */.
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Understanding DeviceNet Network Bandwidth Utilization and
Inter Scan Delay
%nother factor to consider before Inter Scan elay is modified is the %dvanced scanner parameter ;$'pected
5acket 1ate<, also called $51.
$'pected 5acket 1ate is the rate at which the packets will be e'pected to be received by a scanner. The range of
valid values is from */ to (+,///= the default is >,. This value is unitless and must be multiplied by four to
determine the number of milliseconds. If the scanner does not receive a packet from the device in this time period,
it will drop the connection and attempt to open a new connection during subse?uent scan cycles.
With the default value of >, the scanner will wait (// mS for a slave device response before re6opening a
connection to the device. The impact on the machine / 5#2 program is that there may be no data from the device
for this time period.
Two network tuning guidelines came out of this discussion@
Total 3etwork Scan Time should be A B the $51 in mS
IS must be C 1esidual I& data time.
The total 3etwork Scan Time is best measured with the %llen67radley evice3et Traffic %nalyDer. The Traffic
%nalyDer can also be used to measure the actual 1esidual I& transmit time
% good starting point for the IS can be calculated with the following formula@
IS!initial" E !!!BYTES / >" rounded up" ' .F ms" G */ mS
Where BYTES is the total number of bytes produced by the last two slave devices as input data.
$'ample@
The last two slave devices each produce (+ bytes of input data to the scanner.
IS!initial" E !!!). / >" round up" ' .FmS" G */mS
IS!initial" E !*/ ' .F mS" G */ mS
IS!intial" E *F mS
3ote@ The starting point for IS is */ms, but in some systems it may be necessary to use a larger value. This
could happen when there is more than a normal amount of e'plicit messaging occurring on the network. This
e'plicit messaging includes, Scan #ist upload/downloads, 5anel4iew upload/downloads, $/&52 activity
through 1S#in' and any e'plicit messages originating from the user program.
Understanding DeviceNet Network Bandwidth Utilization and
Inter Scan Delay
Network Bandwidth Utilization + !easre!ents fro! NetAlert Net,eter for DeviceNet
The 3et0eter uses an analog sampling system to detect data time and idle time on the network. The
measurement is the ratio of data time to idle time, where idle time is determined by the Inter Scan elay setting.
The sample rate is fi'ed at ). mS and is asynchronous to the total scan rate of any evice3et it is measuring,
resulting in the 3et0eter High and #ow measurements .
The drawing below depicts how the different network scan rates can effect the 3et0eter 7andwidth :tiliDation.
3etwork * is shown with a total network scan rate of ). mS. Since the sample rate of the 3et0eter is the same,
there will be very little variation in the min and ma' network bandwidth readings.
:sing the 3et0eter on 3etwork + will result in a significant difference between the min and ma' readings. The
average of the two will be accurate.
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