A Novel Optical High-Availability Seamless Redundancy (OHSR) Design Based on Beam Splitting / Combining Techniques

Abstract

The standard high-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) protocol utilizes duplicated frame copies of each sent frame for zero fail over time. This means that even in cases of a node or link failure, the destination node will receive at least one copy of the sent frame, resulting in no network downtime. However, the standard HSR is mostly based on the electrical signal connection inside the node, which leads to the production of considerable latency at each node due to frame processing. Therefore, in a large scale HSR ring network, the accumulated latencies become significant and can often restrict the mission-critical real-time application of HSR. In this paper, we present a novel design for optical HSR (OHSR) that uses beam splitting/combining techniques. The proposed OHSR passes the frames directly to adjacent nodes without frame processing at each node, thereby theoretically generating no latency in any node. Various simulations for network samples, made to validate the OHSR design and its performance, show that the OHSR outperforms the standard HSR.