Fault Tolerant Ethernet

Fault Tolerant Ethernet (FTE) is the industrial control network of the Experion® Process Knowledge System (PKS). Combining Honeywell’s expertise in designing robust control networks with commercial Ethernet technology, it goes beyond providing fault tolerance. FTE ensures the performance, determinism and security required for industrial control applications.

What Is It?

The FTE network connects clusters or groups of nodes such as servers and stations, typically associated with the same process unit. It provides multiple communication paths between these nodes so the network can tolerate all single faults and many multiple faults.

FTE ensures rapid detection and recovery in case of communication failures with a switchover time of less than a second. It allows normal Ethernet nodes to connect to the FTE control network and benefit from its highly available communications environment. With FTE, users can leverage commercial Ethernet technology found in IT networks to lower the costs of the FTE control network infrastructure, connections to IT networks and third-party Ethernet devices, and ongoing maintenance and support.

How Does It Work?

FTE ensures that the switchover time in case of a communication failure is less than one second. This is because it uses a single network and does not require a server or station to re-establish its network connection. In addition, the nodes in the FTE control network continually check the status of each communication path to ensure high availability. 

Conventional Ethernet redundancy schemes employ two separate Ethernet networks with each node connected to both networks. If a communication failure occurs, the elapsed time for a particular node to switch to the other network can be over 30 seconds, depending on network equipment and how the system is configured for network failover.

What Problems Does It Solve?

​With FTE industrial control network, users benefit from efficient fault tolerance as well as fast response, determinism and improved security. The solution does not require purpose-built network switches as it uses commercial, off-the-shelf (COTS) technology. FTE is simpler to operate and manage since it allows seamless connection to non-FTE Ethernet nodes and online additional/removal of nodes.