PROFINET
An industrial Ethernet standard from PROFIBUS and PROFINET International that carries real-time control traffic between PLCs, drives and I/O over standard cabling.
PROFINET uses ordinary Ethernet hardware but adds its own frame types and scheduling so that a PLC can exchange process data with field devices cyclically and predictably. Three conformance classes range from TCP/IP-based communication for non-critical data, through real-time traffic with prioritized frames, to isochronous real-time for motion control with synchronized cycles well under a millisecond. It is specified in IEC 61158 and IEC 61784.
It dominates automation cells built on Siemens and compatible equipment and coexists with standard IT traffic on the same network, which is what makes it attractive for industrial IoT: a monitoring gateway can sit on the same switch as the controllers. Its main rival in the high-performance niche is EtherCAT. The trade-off is that PROFINET devices and engineering tools form a vendor ecosystem, and misconfigured switches can break real-time behavior.
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