POWERLINK has been adopted by the IEEE under international standard IEEE 61158. It is the only Industrial Ethernet protocol to achieve this status. The IEEE views its standards for TSN and POWERLINK as core components for real-time industrial communication.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the world's largest professional association in its field. Among its most prominent accomplishments is the IEEE 802.3 standard commonly known as Ethernet.

The IEEE's industrial real-time communication working group has been working for the past two years on the definition of an Industrial Ethernet standard. In March 2017 POWERLINK was adopted as the sole IEEE standard with 97% of the vote.

Unrestricted openness

"Real-time industrial communication had previously been a gap for the IEEE," explained Dr. Victor Huang, responsible for standardisation at the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) following the vote. "With its combination of high performance and unrestricted openness, POWERLINK is the perfect complement to the other IEEE communication standards." "The adoption of POWERLINK as an IEEE standard is an important step toward standardising industrial automation technology at the field level," added Prof Aleksander Malinowski, IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) Senior AdCom Member.

EPSG Managing Director Stefan Schönegger sees great potential for POWERLINK as an IEEE standard, particularly in combination with another IEEE-development: TSN technology. "In every aspect of global industry, openness has a way of winning out."

The Ethernet POWERLINK Standardisation Group (EPSG) is an independent organisation founded in 2003 by leading companies from the fields of motion control and automation technology. Its aims are the standardisation and further development of the POWERLINK protocol first introduced by B&R in 2001. This high-performance real-time communication system is an advanced protocol based on the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard designed to ensure real-time data transfer in the microsecond range. The EPSG cooperates with leading standardisation organisations such as CAN in Automation (CiA), the OPC Foundation and the IEC.

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