Fault-tolerant Ethernet for IP-based process control: A demonstration

We present an efficient middleware-based fault-tolerant Ethernet (FTE) prototype developed for process control networks. This unique approach requires no change of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware (switch, hub, Ethernet physical link and network interface card (NIC)) and software (Ethernet driver and protocol), yet it is transparent to application software. The FTE performs failure detection and recovery for handling multiple points of network failures and supports communications with non FTE-native devices. In this demonstration, we focus on presenting the failure detection and recovery behavior under various failure modes and scenarios. Further, multiple failure handling, node departure and non FTE-native node and FTE node communication scenarios will be presented. The FTE protocol status will be displayed using an FTE user interface on a COTS-based network system