Understanding TCP/IP: How Data Moves on the Plant Floor: Addressing, Routing, and Protocols That Run SCADA Networks

Every device on the plant floor speaks TCP/IP. Most of the people keeping them running were never taught it.Understanding TCP/IP: How Data Moves on the Plant Floor teaches real networking fundamentals aimed where you work. Binary addressing, subnetting, routing, and the TCP handshake are built from the ground up, and every example lives in the plant: an HMI reading a register, a duplicate IP haunting a cell, a poll mysteriously pinned at 200 milliseconds, an I/O connection that faults every Friday afternoon.Sixteen chapters and 79 engineering-schematic illustrations take you from the first Ethernet frame to a fully zoned, defensible OT network, with a troubleshooting method that walks the stack until the fault has nowhere left to hide.Inside: - Industrial Ethernet, VLANs, managed switches, and ring redundancy that survives a cable break- IP addressing and subnetting taught in binary, plus the plant addressing plan that makes a site legible- Ports, sockets, UDP, and TCP: why your I/O rides one transport and your SCADA polls ride the other- Modbus TCP byte by byte: the 40001 off-by-one, exception codes, and the word-order matrix- EtherNet/IP and CIP: Forward Open, RPI, multicast and IGMP snooping, connection and packet budgets- OPC UA, MQTT, and Sparkplug B: certificates, subscriptions, brokers, and birth/death state- DHCP, DNS, and NAT in OT, including the twin OEM skid problem solved with 1:1 NAT- The Purdue model, zones and conduits, the IDMZ, firewall rules, and remote access done right- A complete diagnostic method: the ping ladder, Wireshark filters, and three worked case filesWith a quick-reference appendix, full glossary, and index. Written for controls engineers, SCADA integrators, instrument techs, and maintenance electricians who inherited a network nobody explained.