Reliability and fault tolerance aspects in an industrial LAN

An optical-fiber local area network DAFNE (Deterministic Access Fiber Network), for industrial applications is presented. Important aspects such as reliability and fault tolerance are discussed. The general features and the hardware software structure of the network are dealt with. Hard failures that can affect DAFNE are analyzed, and a general approach to error recovery is proposed. An implemented monitoring process resident at the network management level, able to tolerate the main hard failures through suitable network reconfigurations, is described.<
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