Improvement of High-Availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR) Unicast Traffic Performance Using Port Locking

High-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) is a fault redundancy protocol for Ethernet networks that provides two frame copies for each frame sent. Each copy is forwarded on a separate physical path. HSR is a potential candidate for several fault-tolerant Ethernet applications including smart grid communications. One of the HSR drawbacks is the generation and circulation of unnecessary frames within connected rings regardless of the presence of the destination node in the ring. This downside will degrade network performance and may deplete network resources. In this paper, we present a new approach called port locking (PL) based on the media access control (MAC) address to solve the above-mentioned problem. Our approach makes the network learn gradually the locations of the source and the destination nodes without the network control frames. It then prunes all the rings that do not contain the destination node by locking corresponding rings´ entrance ports. In this way traffic will be significantly reduced for a large size HSR connected ring network and consequently network performance will be greatly enhanced.