In the context of controllers, the cycle time means the processing of the program from reading of the inputs to the provision at the outputs. In the context of communication systems, the cycle time is the time until all data has been exchanged with all participants and the cycle starts again. For IO-Link, it varies depending on the transmission rate. With COM3, a complete transmission cycle takes 0.46 milliseconds. With COM2, the cycle time is 2.3 milliseconds.