Adding fault tolerance mechanisms to Interbus-S

Field bus technology is now a reality in industrial environments. There are many field bus systems commercially available, and each is suitable for particular kinds of applications. In this scenario the Interbus-S system is playing a leading role, due to the efficiency of its protocol. However, a drawback of this communication system is the centralisation of the mono-master arbitration scheme. The presence of a single device to co-ordinate communication activities makes the Interbus-S protocol vulnerable to fault occurrences in the master. Maintaining full compatibility with the existing standard, the authors have defined a protocol extension which allows the whole communication system to continue working after the occurrence of a fault in the master node.