Building scalable Fault tolerant network

Providing fault-tolerance in Ethernet has been a challenging issue. Though it is now possible to create a fault tolerant Ethernet in small-scale networks by using heartbeat mechanism, but for large-scale networks fault tolerance is still a challenge. This work is a contribution to such type of networks which are large and requires fault tolerance. Recursive Scalable Autonomous Fault-tolerant Ethernet (RSAFE) is a novel idea for providing Fault-tolerance in large-scale networks by using its recursive structure. Besides fault tolerance, RSAFE has many desirable features such as RSAFE uses TCP/IP and IP multicast standard communication protocols, in RSAFE growth of network will not effect to the existing network structure, also RSAFE uses Commercial Off-The-shelf products and there is no need of development or modification in existing products, so RSAFE is easier scheme to implement in existing networks. Further, comparison shows that our proposed scheme RSAFE is a cost-effective solution than previously proposed schemes.