Seamless ethernet approach

In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called seamless Ethernet to allow Ethernet switches to provide seamless redundancy with zero recovery time and without the need to modify the standard Ethernet frame layout or even use RSTP protocol. The idea is to flood the frame whose destination is unknown until it reaches the destination switch. The destination switch will consume the first fast frame copy that reaches it, forwarding it to the destination node and then deleting all the remaining flooded frame copies that will be delivered later through other trunk ports. As a result, all terminal off-shelf Ethernet devices will be suitable to be connected to seamless Ethernet switches to produce seamless redundancy, and at the same time, they are still able to connect to standard Ethernet switches without any modifications. Besides this feature, our seamless Ethernet approach shows a traffic reduction percentage of 50% compared to the standard HSR protocol that also provides zero recovery time service, which is another advantage for our seamless Ethernet approach, because it will free more bandwidth than the HSR protocol.