Building Fault Tolerant Industrial Ring Networks with Ethernet Ring Protection Switching (ERPS)
In today's interconnected world, industrialized networks have become an essential part of our modern society. Protecting these systems against network failures or system outages is paramount, and adding redundancy technologies is one surefire method used by administrators and system engineers to ensure operations can continue even in the event of a link failure or network outage. One redundancy protocol gaining popularity is Ethernet Ring Protection Switching (ERPS).
The ITU-T G.8032 Ethernet Ring Protection Switching (ERPS) is an open-standard layer 2 Ethernet protocol designed to detect and prevent switching loops from occurring. Originally developed by the Telecom industry for Metro-Ethernet topologies, today, ERPS is primarily used in industrial networks to create fault-tolerant networks. Like other redundant layers 2 protocols such as spanning-tree and rapid spanning-tree, its primary focus is to prevent looping when a node failes or link failure occurs. Its advantage over other layer 2 redundant protocols, is its ability reconvergence and reroute passing traffic in sub-50 millisecond time when a link fault has been detected. However, due to the rapid speed of the reconvergence, ERPS-specific hardware is required.
