A Novel Approach for Fault-Tolerant Ethernet Implementation

Fault-tolerant Ethernet (FTE) aims to keep data flowing in the network continuously even if there are faults in the network. This is an important requirement in mission critical systems that cannot afford for the network to go down even for a few seconds. In this paper we propose a novel approach for fault-tolerant Ethernet implementation. The proposed approach is a hybrid of conventional hardware and layer 2 software based approaches. Our approach mostly shows the strengths of conventional approaches. We then demonstrate our approach using a single network with redundant cable model that can be easily expanded into multi-cable model.