An open solution to fault-tolerant Ethernet: design, prototyping, and evaluation

Presented is an open solution based approach to fault tolerant Ethernet for process control networks. This unique approach provides fault tolerance capability that requires no change of vendor hardware (Ethernet physical link and Network Interface Card) and software (Ethernet driver and protocol), yet it is transparent to control applications. The open fault tolerant Ethernet (OFTE) developed based on this approach performs failure detection and recovery for handling single point of network failure and serves regular IP traffic. Our experimentation shows that OFTE performs efficiently, achieving less than 1 ms end to end LAN swapping time and less than 2 sec failover time, and that concurrent application and system loads have little impact on the performance of failure detection and recovery operations.