Abstract

The high-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) protocol, a potential candidate for substation automation system (SAS) networks, provides duplicated frame copies of each sent frame, with zero fault-recovery time. This means that even in the case of node or link failure, the destination node will receive at least one copy of the sent frame. Consequently, there is no network operation down time. However, the forwarding process of the QuadBox node in HSR is not smart and relies solely on duplication and random forwarding of all received frames. Thus, if a unicast frame is sent in any closed-loop network, the frame copies will be spread through most of all the links in both directions until they reach the destination node, which inevitably results in significant, unnecessary network traffic. In this paper, we present an algorithm called the dual virtual paths (DVP) algorithm to solve such an HSR excessive traffic issue. The idea behind our DVP algorithm is to establish automatic DVP between each HSR node and all the other nodes in the network, except for the QuadBox node. These virtual paths will be used for DVP unicast traffic transmission, rather than using the standard HSR transmission process. Therefore, the DVP algorithm results in less traffic, because there is no duplication or random forwarding, contrary to standard HSR. For the sample networks selected in this paper, the DVP algorithm shows more than a 70% reduction in network traffic and about an 80% reduction in the discarded traffic compared to the standard HSR protocol.

Highlights

  • Seamless communication with fault tolerance is one of the key requirements for an Ethernet-based mission-critical and real-time power system, such as substation automation system (SAS) networks.A fault-tolerant Ethernet (FTE) eliminates the single point of failure and, improves overall system availability [1]

  • To evaluate the performance of the dual virtual paths (DVP) algorithm compared to the standard high-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) protocol, the network-traffic parameter is chosen as a performance metric, since it will show a clear difference between the two algorithms from the point of view of traffic reduction

  • Algorithm provides better network performance compared to the standard HSR protocol, especially when the network size is large, or we can say that the performance of the DVP algorithm is directly proportional to the network size

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Summary

Introduction

Seamless communication with fault tolerance is one of the key requirements for an Ethernet-based mission-critical and real-time power system, such as substation automation system (SAS) networks. We present a novel algorithm, called the dual virtual paths (DVP) algorithm, to improve the HSR network performance by reducing the unnecessary redundant unicast traffic type in any HSR closed-loop network. These network types always face the problem of duplicating every sent unicast frame at each QuadBox node type available in the network, forwarding these frames randomly toward the destination, which leads to many frame copies circulating in the network.

DVP Concepts
DVP Frame Structure
Three DVP Phases
Announcement Phase
Paths Establishment Phase
Final Phase
Monitoring and Repairing Paths Failures
Path Re-Establishment
Traffic Performance Analyses
Network Traffic Analyses
Network Traffic under the Standard HSR Protocol
Network Traffic under the DVP Algorithm
Traffic Performance Simulations
First Experiment
Second Experiment
Findings
Discussion
Conclusions

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