Modbus is a software protocol, a common language used in electronic controllers. By using this protocol, a controller can communicate with other devices through transmission lines. It is a general industrial standard. With this standard, control devices produced by different manufacturers can be connected to form an industrial network and be monitored in a centralized way.

The Modbus protocol provides two transmission modes, namely American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) and remote terminal units (RTU). On one Modbus network, all the device transmission modes, baud rates, data bits, check bits, end bits, and other basic parameters must be set consistently.

A Modbus network is a control network with one master and multiple slaves, that is, on one Modbus network, there is only one device serving as the master, and other devices are the slaves. The master can communicate with one slave or broadcast messages to all the slaves. For separate access commands, a slave needs to return a response. For broadcasted information, slaves do not need to return responses.