Overview – Echelon FTXL User Manual
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Introduction to FTXL
Overview
Automation solutions for buildings, homes, and industrial applications include
sensors, actuators, and control systems. A
L
ON
W
ORKS
network
is a peer-to-peer
network that uses an industry-standard control network protocol for monitoring
sensors, controlling actuators, communicating with devices, and managing
network operation. In short, a L
ON
W
ORKS
network provides communications and
complete access to control network data from any device in the network.
The communications protocol used for L
ON
W
ORKS
networks is the ANSI/CEA
709.1-B (EN14908.1) Control Network Protocol. This protocol is an international
standard seven-layer protocol that has been optimized for control applications
and is based on the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) Basic Reference Model
(the OSI Model, ISO standard 7498-1). The OSI Model describes computer
network communications through the seven abstract layers described in Table 2.
The implementation of these layers in a L
ON
W
ORKS
device provides standardized
interconnectivity for devices within a L
ON
W
ORKS
network.
Table 2. L
ON
W
ORKS
Network Protocol Layers
OSI Layer
Purpose
Services Provided
7
Application
Application compatibility
Network configuration, self-installation,
network diagnostics, file transfer,
application configuration, application
specification, alarms, data logging,
scheduling
6
Presentation Data interpretation
Network variables, application messages,
foreign frame transmission
5
Session
Control
Request/response, authentication
4 Transport
End-to-end
communication reliability
Acknowledged and unacknowledged
message delivery, common ordering,
duplicate detection
3
Network
Destination addressing
Unicast and multicast addressing,
routers
2
Data Link
Media access and framing Framing, data encoding, CRC error
checking, predictive carrier sense
multiple access (CSMA), collision
avoidance, priority, collision detection
1
Physical
Electrical interconnect
Media-specific interfaces and modulation
schemes
Echelon’s implementation of the ANSI/CEA-709.1 Control Network Protocol is
called the
LonTalk protocol
. Echelon has implementations of the LonTalk
protocol in several product offerings, including the Neuron firmware (which is
included in a ShortStack
®
Micro Server), LNS
®
Server, LNS remote client,
i
.LON
®
servers, and the FTXL LonTalk protocol stack. This document refers to