PROFIBUS DP is an open industrial standard for integrated communication. It is a serial fieldbus, which provides a decentralized connection between sensors, actuators and I/O modules produced by various manufacturers, and connects them to the superset control level. PROFIBUS DP is a version of PROFIBUS optimized for performance, and was specifically designed to meet time critical communications requirements between the controller level and peripheral process devices.

The PROFIBUS DP network supports multiple communications master devices and several slaves. A master may be a PLC (e.g a Quantum with communication module PTQ PDP MV1), a PC or another controller device. A Momentum I/O module with communications adapter 170 DNT 110 00 is a typical PROFIBUS DP slave.

A PROFIBUS DP network supports a data rate of 12 Mbps over distances of 100m and a data rate of 93.75 kbps over distances up to 1200m. The cable consists of 2-wire shielded cable.

A PROFIBUS DP network can support up to 125 devices (recommended configuration: one master per network) with up to 32 slaves per network segment. The individual segments are connected by repeaters. A typical PROFIBUS DP configuration with Momentum modules can be found in the Configurationsection.