Availability analysis and optimization of HSR-based ethernet mesh networks

The IEC 62439-3 high-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) protocol can achieve maximal network availability by means of simultaneously transmitting duplicate frames over disjoint paths for a full utilization of inherent network redundancies. Deploying HSR in mesh networks, however, requires significant design practices to avoid an unnecessary network cost spending. This paper investigates the trade-off between the redundancy investment and the realization of the network availability demanded by the customer. In this regard, we propose an optimized design scheme for cost-effective resilient HSR mesh networks and develop an enumeration based algorithm exploiting the concept of meta-mesh graph reduction. The NP-hardness of the problem, however, limits the applicability of enumeration based approaches to only small size networks. Hence, a greedy-based heuristic algorithm is proposed to overcome the computation complexity. The simulation results show that our heuristic algorithm achieves a performance comparable to the optimal solutions.