The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) has announce that its plugfest series of the Time Sensitive Networking (TSN) Testbed has been a success and that it will expand the TSN Testbed to Europe. At the March 2017 IIC Member Meeting, in Reston, Virginia, the TSN Testbed received top ranking in the Testbed Showcase, where IIC testbed leaders were judged by their peers on their testbeds' strategic value.

Plugfests are face-to-face events where participants gather to test the interoperability of their enhanced products and technology. The fifth plugfest took place February 27- March 1 in Austin, Texas at the NI Industrial IoT Lab where it tested things such as synchronizing devices to a common, precise sense of time delivered over the network; establishing TSN flows between various vendors; communicating input/output traffic via TSN flows; and demonstrating TSN’s ability to protect critical flows from high-bandwidth traffic.

The most recent plugfest took place March 16-17 near Frankfurt, Germany. The testbed in Europe, established at Bosch Rexroth development site for IoT related control and communication solutions in Erbach, shall enable more companies to participate in the plugfests and join the testbed. Results from this latest plugfest will be demonstrated at both the IIC booth and the OPC UA booth at Hannover Messe (HMI) 2017. Some testbed participants will also have TSN displays in their respective booths at HMI.

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TSN Testbed participants include IIC members Analog Devices, Belden/Hirschmann, Bosch Rexroth, B&R Industrial Automation, Cisco, Hilscher, KUKA, National Instruments, Renesas Electronics, Schneider Electric, SICK AG, TTTech and Xilinx. Other participants include Calnex, Ixia, ISW – Stuttgart University and Phoenix Contact.