• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.37C no.11
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• pp.1162-1169
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• 2012

One of the important operational requirements for mission critical Ethernet networked system is having the fault tolerant capability. Such capability can be obtained by equipping multiport Network Interface Card (NIC) in each node in the system. Conventional NIC uses two or more Media Access Controls (MACs) and a co-processor for the MAC switching whenever an active port fails. Since firmware is needed for the co-processor, longer fail-over switching and degraded throughput can be generally expected. Furthermore the system upgrading requiring the firmware revision in each tactical node demands high cost. In this paper we propose a novel single MAC based NIC that does not use a co-processor, but just use general discrete building blocks such as MAC chip and switching chip, which results in better performances than conventional method. Experimental results validate our scheme.