When should you use an Industrial Layer 3 switch?
Layer 3 routing protocol is becoming more and more important to industrial network topologies, such as intelligent transportation management and applications related to urban infrastructure. Industrial applications normally work with a variety of industrial devices within an isolated network, with few monitoring interfaces at the field site. However, as connectivity demands continue to grow in the IIoT era, the number of connected edge devices is continuing to grow, resulting in an increased need of network bandwidth and organization. This reveals new network management challenges, and also raises new issues in data security. Traditional Layer 2 logic subnetting faces practical and performance limitations when applied to topologies with a large number of devices. To ensure flexible industrial application planning, Layer 3 devices have been introduced into advanced management, with a host of features that are quickly becoming “must haves”.
