RSTP, Convergence Times, Failure Domain's and its effects Industrial Networking

[David GarciaParticipantKarma: 49Rank: Padawan]

Hello PLCGuru’s,

I have a question regarding RSTP, I know it has its benefits. Redundancy, Loop Protection, Topology Flexibility Ring, Mesh etc… I also know the Recovery times can be pretty slow, and that it can be complicated to configure. That it requires a lot of tune-up once it’s deployed, vs a Proprietary Ring. Also if you want to get ms recovery usually you have to use same vendor switches, to get that result.

My question is specifically about Convergence Times and how they affect Network Failure Recovery times. More importantly, how this affects the entire network, not just the 1 switch that experienced the Link Failure. Which can bring your entire network down, because your latency pushed response times to over 100 ms and your Safety Mechanism kicked in.

Why would you use that over a proprietary redundant ring technology, which is usually easier to configure and has way faster recovery times?

In your opinion when should you use RSTP, and when should you consider an alternative maybe one that’s interoperable with RSTP.

Does growing Network, or faster recovery times usually force adoption of an RSTP alternative?
I hope this makes sense…

Thanks!

DG

 

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