  Industrial automation has received a considerable attention in the last few
years with the rise of Internet of Things (IoT). Specifically, industrial
communication network technology such as Profinet has proved to be a major game
changer for such automation. However, industrial automation devices often have
to exhibit robustness to dynamically changing network conditions and thus,
demand a rigorous testing environment to avoid any safety-critical failures.
Hence, in this paper, we have proposed an FPGA-based novel framework called
Profi-Load to generate Profinet traffic with specific intensities for a
specified duration of time. The proposed Profi-Load intends to facilitate the
performance testing of the industrial automated devices under various network
conditions. By using the advantage of inherent hardware parallelism and
re-configurable features of FPGA, Profi-Load is able to generate Profinet
traffic efficiently. Moreover, it can be reconfigured on the fly as per the
specific requirements. We have developed our proposed Profi-Load framework by
employing the Xilinx-based NetJury device which belongs to Zynq-7000 FPGA
family. A series of experiments have been conducted to evaluate the
effectiveness of Profi-Load and it has been observed that Profi-Load is able to
generate precise load at a constant rate for stringent timing requirements.
Furthermore, a suitable Human Machine Interface (HMI) has also been developed
for quick access to our framework. The HMI at the client side can directly
communicate with the NetJury device and parameters such as, required load
amount, number of packet(s) to be sent or desired time duration can be selected
using the HMI.
