News

High-availability Seamless Redundancy for Industrial Communication

 

The Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW) in Winterthur/Switzerland is evaluating the feasibility of the redundancy protocol „High-availability Seamless Redundancy” (HSR) according to IEC 62439. The project is supported by the Swiss innovation promotion agency CTI and executed in co-operation with ABB, Hirschmann, and Siemens.

While other Ethernet redundancy mechanisms usually include network reconfiguration, where communication is shortly interrupted during the actual switchover process, HSR provides bumpless redundancy without any switchover loss. Both ring topologies as well as parallel configurations are supported. Bumpless redundancy is important for demanding applications in Industrial and Power applications, in particular in process-related communication. In addition to a prototype implementation in FPGA hardware, the project result will also be proof for the specification as contained in IEC 62439.

In 3rd quarter 2010, a prototype for an open interoperability testing with other implementations of HSR according to IEC 62439 will be ready and is part of the project.

The project results in terms of the validation of the protocol specification will be completely fed back to the standardization process. The developed VHDL code will be made available via ZHAW subject to FRAND (fair, reasonable and non discriminatory terms) conditions after conclusion of the project.

 

Contact:

E-Mail: info(at)zhaw.ch

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