Industry 4.0 adoption demands greater process transparency which, in turn, allows businesses to better manage their activities.

Transparency is all about being able to extract more data from processes and analyze it to gather meaningful information to get a better and deeper comprehension of what is happening on the factory floor. It is not possible to know how to improve and control a process if there is not a clear understanding of what it is doing.

This need to extract process information has led to the rise of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), as it provides an effective framework to generate, collect, share and analyze data. This solution is based on the Internet of Things (IoT) with the idea of connecting physical assets, such as sensors and actuators, to controllers and higher-level systems to monitor, control and manage them.

In practice, the IIoT applies the IoT to industrial activities, such as manufacturing. The result is an ecosystem of sensors, machinery and people all connected together that offers a granular view of operations and enables control of any variable that could affect production. The two technologies not only differ in their areas of application, but in their performance capabilities. For example, the IIoT was developed to handle highly time critical processes, such as high-speed packaging machines. Therefore, it required very reliable and predictable communication methods to connect devices such as sensitive and precise sensors to highly sophisticated, advanced controls and analytics. Collected together, these properties as are known as determinism, which is an essential requirement for industrial Ethernet applications.

While the IIoT offers an effective technology platform for Industry 4.0 applications, its foundation is a suitable network with the necessary level of determinism to share all data generated by a process. This transparency depends on convergence, i.e. the ability to combine multiple types of traffic on a single network, which in turn depends on determinism.

The technology that automation is moving towards to address this need for convergence is Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN).