ARCNET was developed by Datapoint in the U.S.A. and was successfully applied in office LANs.
Fixed to a data rate of 2.5 Mbit/s it was repelled by the faster Ethernet in this sector, as the fast transfer of huge amounts of data is paramount in offices, while real-time operation is not required.
Yet this latter property is demanded by industrial applications.
SMSC launched a family of ARCNET controllers taylored to usage in the fieldbus area as well as on device-internal backplanes. These are applied in large numbers in various industrial and medical sectors making ARCNET one of the most widespread network solutions
Here you will find further information about ARCNET.
ARCNET is a bus system enabling powerful and reasonable priced fieldbus solutions. ARCNET plays out its strengths in linking intelligent units as e.g. the PLCs to surveillance installations. It ensures short and predictable response times even when handling larger data volumes due to bus allocation by means of Token Passing. Last but not least its simple user interfaces allows for straightforward and cheap implementations making ARCNET the bus of choice for various applications.
Advantages of ARCNET:
- Deterministic – through Token Passing
- Double checked – by hash sums and handshaking
- Cheap – the protocol being implemented in one chip
- Easily programmable – via a user interface
- Variable network architectures – bus, tree and star topologies as well as mixed forms are possible
- Various transmission media – coaxial, twisted pair and fiber transmission paths can be interconnected
- Large net extension – allowed for even with standard baud rates
- Automatic joining and leaving – of nodes without user interference
- Variable package sizes – ranging from 1 to 507 payload bytes
- Variable data rates – from 30 bps to 10 Mbps
- Master master access
- High efficiency