Fault-tolerant ethernet network

摘要

Fault-tolerant Ethernet is provided through the use of special interfaces (14a,b) providing duplicate ports that may be alternatively enabled with the same network address. A switching between the ports, corrects for single faults in a two-way redundant system (16a,b) without time-consuming reconfiguration of other end devices (12a-e) or the need for complex middleware in the end devices (12a-e).