An adaptive and reliable data-path determination for Fault-Tolerant Ethernet using heartbeat mechanism

In this paper, we introduce an implementation of the heartbeat mechanism to determine the route (called data-path) for communication between two nodes in a subnet. The data-path is adaptive and reliable in order to keep data flowing in the network continuously even if there are faults in the network. This is a utility for Fault-Tolerant Ethernet (FTE) implementation. Our implementation has been designed and developed as an essential module in a new fault-tolerant, large-scale network scheme called scalable autonomous fault-tolerant Ethernet (SAFE). The SAFE scheme has been developed for use in the combat system data network (CSDN). Our module not only detects the network fault but also provides the information for the fault recovery process. The implementation has been also validated through experiments in various network failure scenarios.