Complex Industrial Networks

Industrial networks have particular requirements that make them differ from normal IT networks. Network resilience is critical with downtime of even a fraction of a second being an issue. RedFox supports STP (Spanning Tree Protocol) and RSTP (Rapid STP), but also FRNT (Fast Reconfiguration of Network Topology) our own unique protocol that provides almost seamless network reconfiguration.

The industrial environment can also see unusual volumes of certain types of data, for instance multicast packets are common in IP based industrial automation protocols and video applications. This class of traffic can cause significant problems with switches and even worse problems with ring redundancy, so RedFox supports IGMP Snooping with special extensions for FRNT.

Virtual LANs have now become vitally important in segregating networks and RedFox offers advanced VLAN support allowing data traffic to be segmented at a port level and via VLAN tagging.

Industrial applications often demand real-time class communications and RedFox offers switching functions that can ensure Ethernet can be used in all but the most rigorous real time applications. Methods to prioritise packets based on Layer-2 and Layer-3 information are supported as well as techniques such as head of line blocking prevention to stop data bottlenecks developing in the network.

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