Utility communication method and system

Abstract

An exemplary method and system of the present disclosure use the Parallel Redundancy Protocol PRP (IEC 62439-3) for traffic duplication and redundant transport of the duplicated traffic in a single packet-switched wide-area communication network including a plurality of nodes interconnected via inter-node links in a meshed topology. The method involves identifying, between a send and receive node, two distinct communication paths with no link or node in common except for the send and receive node, and configuring the send and receive nodes to operate according to the Parallel Redundancy Protocol PRP. At any time during regular operation, and for any critical message to be transmitted from the send to the receive node, two redundant packets can be generated, and each of the redundant packets is sent via one of the two communication paths, resulting in an increased availability of the communication network without incurring the cost of full network duplication.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.