Telemetry Friendly Multiple Protocol Support over the same Communication Path

Empower Multi-Protocol Telemetry Applications

Applications found in industries such as oil & gas, water/wastewater, and utilities may require connections to remote sites having devices supporting more than one communications protocol at a site or between sites.

It is common in these situations for a single host radio connection to be used to communicate to each site, requiring the driver used to use the same connection with multiple protocols. This can be found in legacy serial radio connections but also sometimes in serial protocols running in encapsulated Ethernet packets or over Ethernet radios.  

TOP Server's built-in (that means free!) Connection Sharing Plug-In allows TOP Server to support multiple protocols over the same connection when using certain compatible drivers. Learn more about this powerful feature on this page. 

Virtual Networks for Communication Serialization

Channels share a connection through communication serialization, which is a server feature that allows a set of channels to be placed in their own virtual network such that only one channel is allowed to use the connection at a time, using the duty cycle / sharing parameters  you configure.

When utilizing Connection Sharing, users can define a specific virtual network that will communicate using the same physical medium. When a channel is given the opportunity to communicate, the specified number of blocked/non-blocked read/write Transactions per Cycle are attempted.

Automatic management of opening/closing connections

When using a shared connection among multiple channels, the underlying communications medium will be opened when needed for communications and closed when the specified number of transactions have completed.

For legacy dial-up modem communications, this means that the connection will be dropped. The modem will return to an idle state between uses. If no reads or writes are pending on a channel that is sharing a connection, the port will remain closed and the next channel in line to use it will be given its turn (and so on).