QoS-Aware Ring Redundancy Protocol (QoS-ARRP) for High-Availability Ethernet Networks

During the last decade, Ethernet's significance has increased in many embedded systems application areas, such as automotive, avionics and automation. However, guaranteeing the required availability level for such applications on Ethernet is still a hot research topic. In this specific area, we propose in this paper a new redundancy protocol for high availability Ethernet networks, called QoS-Aware Ring Redundancy Protocol (QoS-ARRP). First, the specifications of such a protocol are detailed, including the frame redundancy and filtering management, the auto-configuration mechanisms, as well as the maximum recovery time analysis. Second, the numerical results of the recovery time have shown the impact of the protocol parameters to tune and the trade-off between availability and scalability of the network. Moreover, we have benchmarked the state-of-the-art results on the recovery time against ours. A noticeable enhancement of the maximum recovery time with our proposal, thus of the availability level, has been highlighted.