Deterministic Data Communication Architecture for Safety-Critical Networks in Nuclear Power Plants

To develop a safety-critical network in nuclear power plants that puts more stringent requirements than the competitive commercial ones do, we establish four design criteria - deterministic communication, explicit separation/isolation structure, reliability, verification & validation. According to those design criteria, the fundamental design elements are chosen as follows - a star topology, point-to-point physical link, connection-oriented link control and fixed allocation access control. After analyzing the design elements, we also build a communication architecture with TDM (Time Division Multiplexing) bus switching scheme. Finally, We develop a DDCNet (Deterministic Data Communication Network) based on the established architecture. The DDCNet is composed of 64 nodes and guarantees the transmission bandwidth of 10Mbps and the delay of 10 msec for each node. It turns out that the DDCNet satisfies the aforementioned design criteria and can be adequately utilized for our purpose.

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