Optimization and Evaluation of Container-Based EtherCAT Communication in Virtual PLCs

Deploying EtherCAT in container-based virtualized programmable logic controllers (vPLCs) faces critical challenges regarding driver portability, network determinism, and synchronization scalability. This article proposes a container-native architecture named vECAT by leveraging the data plane development kit (DPDK) for high-performance user-space packet processing, which eliminates kernel dependencies and ensures cross-platform portability. We develop a latency model that characterizes the end-to-end packet processing pipeline and guides systematic optimizations at the task, OS, and hardware levels. We also introduce an enhanced synchronization algorithm to address error accumulation in large-scale networks.…