Performance Analysis of Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP)

The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) recently standardized several Industrial Ethernet solutions that introduce the fieldbus concepts within Ethernet based networks. In addition, the IEC 62439 standardized a set of redundancy management protocols, including the Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP). In this way, IEC standards provide a variety of Ethernet-based solutions for satisfying both temporal and redundancy management requirements of Industrial Area Networks (IANs). In this paper, after a detailed study and implementation of MRP, two factors are identified that have an important impact on the protocol performance: the offset time and the physical detection time. A method is then provided to calculate a threshold to the network recovery time. Finally, extensive simulations and experimental measurements are performed to accurately evaluate the effect of the aforementioned factors on the protocol performance.