A Cost-Efficient and Continuous Ethernet Cable Diagnosis Technique based on Undersampling

The monitoring of industrial environments ensures that highly automated processes run without interruption. However, even if the industrial machines themselves are monitored, the communication lines are currently not continuously monitored in todays installations. They are checked usually only during maintenance intervals or in case of error. In addition, the cables or connected machines usually have to be removed from the system for the duration of the test. To overcome these drawbacks, we have developed and implemented a cost-efficient and continuous signal monitoring of Ethernet-based industrial bus systems. Several methods have been developed to assess the quality of the cable. These methods can be classified to either passive or active. Active methods are not suitable if interruption of the communication is undesired. Passive methods, on the other hand, require oversampling, which calls for expensive hardware. In this paper, a novel passive method combined with undersampling targeting cost-efficient hardware is proposed.