Ethernet Switch Features Important To Ethernet/Ip
Ethernet Switch Features Important To Ethernet/Ip
Important to EtherNet/IP
Switch Features are Important
Required:
• Full-duplex capability on all ports
• IGMP Snooping
• Port Mirroring
Recommended:
• VLAN
• Auto-negotiation and manually configurable speed/duplex
• Wire-speed switching fabric
• SNMP for switch management
• IEEE 802.1D Spanning Tree Protocol
Full duplex capability eliminates collisions on the wire due to the separate
transmit and receive channels for each device. Combined with the speed of
switches available today, delays related to collisions or traffic in the switch
can be made negligible. The end result is you can achieve a high degree of
determinism with an EtherNet/IP network and it works well for I/O control.
Internet Group Multicast Protocol (IGMP)
Snooping
IGMP Snooping: Sends out IGMP polls
to plant network to determine who is in
a multicast group
IGMP snooping constrains the
flooding of multicast traffic by
dynamically configuring switch Layer 3 Switch or Router Listens to the polls
and responses to
ports so that multicast traffic is determine who is in
forwarded only to ports associated each multicast group
with a particular IP multicast group.
Layer 2 Switch Layer 2 Switch
IGMP Snooping:
to plant network
Normally, a commercial layer 2
Note that none of
switch that “supports” IGMP the multicast traffic
snooping needs a router (which hits the router
could be a layer 3 switch) to Layer 3 Switch or Router
Port Mirroring:
Port mirroring refers to the ability to direct a duplicate of the frames being transmitted on one port to
another port. This allows a traffic analyzer to be connected to a switch and have the ability to monitor
the traffic on a given port. Without port mirroring, an analyzer is not able to see frames on other ports.
Traffic analyzers are used extensively by people who support Ethernet networks. Therefore, it is
critical that a switch is selected that supports port mirroring so that a traffic analyzer will function
correctly on the network.
Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs)
VLAN:
The benefits of VLANs are that a switch can be configured to handle two isolated networks without the
traffic from one network burdening the other. IP multicast traffic from VLAN 1 will not reach VLAN 2.
For multicast traffic, you could accomplish the same thing with IGMP snooping. However, a VLAN will
also block unicast and broadcast traffic, and adds a measure of security between networks.
Controller1 PC Controller2
1 3 2
Switch
VLAN 1 VLAN 2
4 5 6 7 8
I/O
Auto-negotiation / Manually Configurable
Speed/Duplex
Two other areas where this switch feature can be helpful include when
fibers converters are used in a system (auto-negotiation is not supported
by fiber links) and to eliminate potential incompatibilities in the
implementation of the auto-negotiation by different device vendors.
Wire-speed Switching Fabic
The switch should have the ability to enable and disable this feature
on a per port basis.
Desirable Switch Features