In this paper, we present a new fault-tolerant, large-scale star network scheme called Scalable Autonomous Fault-tolerant Ethernet (SAFE). The primary goal of a SAFE scheme is to provide network scalability and autonomous fault detection and recovery. SAFE divides a large-scale, mission-critical network, such as the naval combatant network, into several subnets by limiting the number of nodes in each subnet. This network can be easily configured as a star network in order to meet fault recovery time requirements. For SAFE, we developed a novel mechanism for inter-subnet fault detection and recovery; a conventional Ethernet-based heartbeat mechanism is used in each subnet. Theoretical and experimental performance analyses of SAFE in terms of fail-over time were conducted under various network failure scenarios. The results validate our scheme.

High-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) is a fault-tolerant protocol for Ethernet networks that provides two frame copies for each frame sent. Each copy is forwarded on a separate physical path. HSR is a potential candidate for several fault-tolerant Ethernet applications including smart grid communications. However, one of the drawbacks of the HSR protocol is that it generates and circulates unnecessary frames within connected rings regardless of the presence of a destination node in the ring. This downside will degrade network performance and may deplete network resources. Previously, we proposed a simple but efficient approach to solving the above problem, namely, port locking (PL), which is based on the media access control address. The PL approach enables the network to learn the locations of the source and destination nodes gradually for each connection pair without using network control frames; the PL then prunes all the rings that do not contain the destination node by locking the corresponding ring's entrance ports at its QuadBox node. In this paper, we present an enhanced port-locking (EPL) approach that increases the number of pruned unused HSR rings. The analysis and corresponding simulation results show that the network traffic volume is significantly reduced for a large-sized HSR connected-rings network and consequently, network performance is greatly improved compared to the standard HSR protocol, and even PL.