MESHNET: a new fault-tolerant LAN for industrial environment

The design and protocol for a fault-tolerant high-performance local area network called MESHNET is proposed. It is a token passing scheme with multiple buses. It provides multiple paths between any pair of nodes and thus the fault-tolerance feature. Under fault-free conditions, it can support a much faster rate of traffic generation and a much higher number of nodes compared to a single bus architecture and gives a better performance in terms of channel utilization, throughput, and average delay per data packet. It maintains connectivity even when multiple faults have occurred. The topology, architecture, and other basic features of the proposed network are described, and a preliminary reliability analysis is presented.<>