Working groups focus on tasks like safety, technology, marketing, certification and end users.
The EPSG cooperates with the standardization bodies and associations, like the CAN in Automation (CiA) Group and the IEC.
Repeating hubs instead of switches within the Real-time domain is recommended to minimise delay and jitter.
The standard Ethernet data link layer is extended by an additional bus scheduling mechanism, which secures that at a time only one node is accessing the network.
The Managing Node (MN) grants access to the physical medium via dedicated poll request messages.
As a result, only one single node (CN) has access to the network at a time, which avoids collisions, present on older Ethernet hubs before switches.
For that reason, the isochronous phase can distinguish between transfer slots dedicated to particular nodes, which have to send their data in every basic cycle, and slots shared by nodes to transfer their data one after the other in different cycles.
The solution is the integration of safety relevant application data into the standard serial control protocol.
Measures to avoid any undetected failures due to systematic or stochastic errors are an integral part of a functional safety protocol.