Improvement of high-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) traffic performance for smart grid communications

Abstract

High-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) is a redundancy protocol for Ethernet networks that provides two frame copies for each frame sent. Each copy will pass through separate physical paths, pursuing zero fault recovery time. This means that even in the case of a node or a link failure, there is no stoppage of network operations whatsoever. HSR is a potential candidate for the communications of a smart grid, but its main drawback is the unnecessary traffic created due to the duplicated copies of each sent frame, which are generated and circulated inside the network. This downside will degrade network performance and might cause network congestion or even stoppage. In this paper, wepresent two approaches to solve the above-mentioned problem. The first approach is called quick removing (QR), and is suited to ring or connected ring topologies. The idea is to remove the duplicated frame copies from the network when all the nodes have received one copy of the sent frame and begin to receive the second copy. Therefore, the forwarding of those frame copies until they reach the source node, as occurs in standard HSR, is not needed in QR. Our example shows a traffic reduction of 37.5% compared to the standard HSR protocol. The second approach is called the virtual ring (VRing), which divides any closed-loop HSR network into several VRings. Each VRing will circulate the traffic of a corresponding group of nodes within it. Therefore, the traffic in that group will not affect any of the other network links or nodes, which results in an enhancement of traffic performance. For our sample network, the VRing approach shows a network traffic reduction in the range of 67.7 to 48.4% in a healthy network case and 89.7 to 44.8% in a faulty network case, compared to standard HSR.