  With the advancement in the automation industry, to perform complex remote
operations is required. Advancements in the networking technology has led to
the development of different architectures to implement control from a large
distance. In various control applications of the modern industry, the agents,
such as sensors, actuators, and controllers are basically geographically
distributed. For efficient working of a control application, all of the agents
have to exchange information through a communication media. At present, an
increasing number of distributed control systems are based on platforms made up
of conventional PCs running open-source real-time operating systems. Often,
these systems needed to have networked devices supporting synchronized
operations with respect to each node. A framework is studied that relies on
standard software and protocol as RTAI, EtherCAT, RTnet and IEEE 1588. RTAI and
its various protocols are studied in network control systems environment.
