A novel ring-based dual paths approach for reducing redundant traffic in HSR networks

In this paper, we propose a novel dual paths-based approach, called ring-based dual paths (RDP), to significantly reduce redundant unicast traffic in high-availability seamless redundancy (HSR) networks. RDP establishes dual paths for forwarding unicast frames between nodes in HSR networks. Unlike existing dual paths-based approaches, such as dual virtual paths (DVP) that establish dual paths for each connection pair of HSR terminal nodes, RDP sets up dual paths for each connection pair of HSR rings. Therefore, RDP significantly reduces the number of established dual paths, which, in turn, reduces the overhead in discovering and establishing dual paths, as well as the memory space required to store these paths compared with the existing dual paths-based approaches. The performance of RDP has been analyzed, evaluated, and compared to that of the standard HSR protocol and the DVP approach. Various simulations were conducted to validate the traffic performance analysis. Analytical and simulation results showed that for the sample networks RDP reduced network unicast traffic by 80-88% compared with the standard HSR protocol, thus freeing up network bandwidth and improving network traffic performance.