Performance analysis of Mechatrolink-III

Abstract

Mechatrolink-III is a real-time Ethernet protocol designed to achieve high performance with short cycle time. The Mechatrolink-III protocol includes five communication phases: synchronization, cyclic communication, retry communication, C1 master message communication, and C2 master message communication. These communication phases directly affect the cycle time of Mechatrolink-III. This paper analyzes the real-time performance of the Mechatrolink-III protocol according to cycle time on line and tree topologies. Moreover, we measure parameters that influence these communication phases in our system, and construct a formula to calculate the cycle time based on those parameters.