Dependability of switched network architectures for Networked Control Systems

The switched Ethernet networks are more and more deployed in industry. The Spanning Tree Protocol implemented in the switches enables to manage the link connectivity. But the reconfiguration time of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) when link failure occurred is not adapted in regard to the industrial constraints. The objective of this paper is to propose a method based only on Standard mitigating the probability of disconnection between nodes having hard real-time properties. The approach developed in this paper consists in duplicating frames and in forwarding them on different paths. These paths are optimized and specified by using genetic algorithms. OPNET simulations show the interest of this proposal on a particular Networked Control System.