Cellular to Allen-Bradley SLC5/05 on TCP 2222

The old CSPv4 protocol.

The Rockwell/AB SLC5/05 and PLC5E natively speak an older "unpublished" protocol named CSPv4, although most third party vendors call it either AB/Ethernet or AB/TCP. It moves only on TCP port 2222 - ODVA Ethernet/IP I/O Messaging is only on UDP port 2222, so they don't conflict. The protocol consists (normally) of a 3-part packet:

• 28-byte header
• 4 or 15-byte LSAP or end-point addressing packet
• PCCC message which is basically what DF1 documents as an Application Packet

In general, the packets are fairly sparse and compressible (if you have the tools to do this). The characteristics of CSPv4 which impact cellular (and wide-area-network) support:

• Rockwell tools and PLC only support use of TCP/IP and port 2222; this greatly limits use of CSPv4 in NAT'd networks since the remote NAT router can only forward TCP port 2222 to a single remote PLC.
• CSPv4 includes a single TCP packet exchange to "register a session" or connect. If you are polling faster than the PLC will hang-up on you, then this is not important. However, if you poll slow enough that a new TCP/IP socket must be opened for each poll, then even ignoring the TCP socket open/close overhead this nearly doubles your traffic costs.
• In tests, a SLC5/05 seems effective at including the TCP ACK response to the host within the CSPv4 data response packet, so you only have to pay for one empty TCP ACK, which is the host's acknowledgment to the PLC for the response.
• TCP Keepalive could be an issue, since most hosts fail to issue it and the SLC5/05 I've tested against either doesn't issue TCP keepalives
  or does it very frequently.