1. The Network Gateway Series Concept
The XLTR-200 is a member of the ICC Network Gateway Series product family. Members of this family are designed to provide a uniform interface, configuration and application experience. This commonality reduces the user’s learning curve, reducing commissioning time while simplifying support. The XLTR-200 provides simultaneous support for many different communication protocols, allowing complex interchanges of data between otherwise incompatible networks.
The heart of the Network Gateway Series concept is an element called the “point database”. The point database is entirely user-configurable, and provides the mapping information that allows requests from the various supported networks to be interpreted and stored in a common format. This allows data to be routed from any supported network to any other supported network.
Additionally, the point database provides the added benefit of “data mirroring”, whereby current copies of point values (populated by a “source port” designation) are maintained locally within the gateway itself. This greatly reduces the request-to-response latency times on the various networks, as requests (read or write) can be entirely serviced locally, thereby eliminating the time required to execute a secondary transaction on a different network.
When properly configured, the gateway will become essentially “transparent” on the networks, and the various network devices can engage in seamless dialogs with each other.
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