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1. The Network Gateway Series Concept
The MBP-100 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
MBP-100 provides simultaneous support for many different communication
protocols, allowing complex interchanges of data among 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.