Modbus is one of the oldest and most popular ICS protocols in use today, largely because of it’s openness and simplicity. Modbus is a digital communication protocol for two or more devices to talk to one another. Modbus is related to the application-level protocols of the Open System Interconnection (OSI) network model. The physical layer is not specified in the Modbus protocol. As a result, Modbus implementations are not limited to a single communication media. This frees the communications engineer to select the best physical media for transporting Modbus packets. It has an open source code, which allows most field controllers to support Modbus, and this has made it very popular. Click the icon below to learn how Modbus is used.
Modbus
- Simple protocol
- Low cost development
- Minimum hardware requirement to support
- Master/slave protocol
- Communicates with up to 247 devices
- Uses standard TCP/IP protocols
Because thousands of vendors have adopted the protocol, Modbus can be found in:
- Industrial Buildings
- Commercial Buildings
- Infrastructure
- Transportation
- Energy Applications
Modbus is a serial communications protocol, which acts as a message structure to a establish a master/slave or client/server communication between intelligent devices. This means that a master device talks to all the other devices on the network. It can query them for information or tell them what to do. Unlike most other protocols, however, Modbus is used for both command and control and device level communications.