System monitoring for a real time local area network *

Distributed and hierarchical real-time control systems are becoming frequently popular in industrial and manufacturing applications. Now, many real-time control systems include expert system components or implement AI programs for supervision control. These real-time systems are characterized by a hierarchical control structure and a distributed nature, where different levels are interconnected by a local area network. This paper describes the monitoring tools for a low-cost network architecture based on the 83c152 Intel microcontroller for the automatization of the industrial applications. Monitoring tools are specialized tools developed to study the network performance and its behavior under different load conditions. These tools will provide the information needed to teet and compare several communication protocols, fine-tune them and will help us to select the best network configuration to suit specific needs for any embedded application.