Media Redundancy Protocol

Figure 1: MRP ring in Ring-Closed status

Figure 2: MRP ring in Ring-Open status

Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP) is a data network protocol standardized by the International Electrotechnical Commission as IEC 62439-2. It allows rings of Ethernet switches to overcome any single failure with recovery time much faster than achievable with Spanning Tree Protocol. ^[1] It is suitable to most industrial Ethernet applications.

Properties

MRP operates at the data link layer (OSI Layer 2) of Ethernet switches and is a direct evolution of the HiPER-Ring protocol developed by Hirschmann in 1998. ^{[2] [3]} Hirschmann is now owned by Belden. ^[4] MRP is supported by several commercial industrial Ethernet switches. ^{[5] [6]}

In an MRP ring, the ring manager is named Media Redundancy Manager (MRM), while ring clients are named Media Redundancy Clients (MRCs).

MRM and MRC ring ports support three statuses: disabled, blocked, and forwarding:

• Disabled ring ports drop all the received frames. They also do not send any frames.
• Blocked ring ports drop all the received frames except the MRP control frames. They also do not send any frames except MRP control frames.
• Forwarding ring ports receive all frames and also forward the received frames.

During normal operation, the network works in the Ring-Closed status (Figure 1). In this status, one of the MRM ring ports is blocked, while the other is forwarding. Conversely, both ring ports of all MRCs are forwarding. Loops are avoided because the physical ring topology is reduced to a logical line topology.

In case of failure, the network works in the Ring-Open status (Figure 2). For instance, in case of failure of a link connecting two MRCs, the MRM sets both of its ring ports to the forwarding state; the MRCs adjacent to the failure each have a disabled port (because of the link loss) and a forwarding ring port; the other MRCs have both ring ports forwarding. Also, in the Ring-Open status, the network logical topology is a line.

Frame structure

MRP information is sent in the form of an Ethernet frame, with the EtherType field set to 0x88E3. The frames are built by Type–length–value (TLV) structures, allowing organizationally specific information.

Standards

The International Electrotechnical Commission standard for MRP was published in 2010 as IEC 62439-2 ^[7] and amended in 2012.

The standard IEC 62439 published in 2012 also defined the following protocols:

• Parallel Redundancy Protocol (PRP)
• Cross-network Redundancy Protocol - CRP
• Beacon Redundancy Protocol - BRP
• High-availability Seamless Redundancy (HSR)

With the settings specified in IEC 62439-2, MRP guarantees a worst-case recovery time of 500 ms, 200 ms, or 30 ms in rings composed of up to 50 switches, and a worst-case recovery time of 10 ms in rings composed of up to 14 switches.

See also

• Fieldbus

References

1. A. Giorgetti; et al. (February 3, 2013). "Performance Analysis of Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP)". IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics. 9. IEEE Computer Society: 218–227. doi:10.1109/TII.2012.2186584. S2CID   5696119.
2. "Hirschmann Networking Interoperability to Industrial/Process and EtherNet/IP Environments" (PDF). White paper. December 8, 2003. Archived from the original (PDF) on May 16, 2008. Retrieved August 17, 2013.
3. Marc Lee (November 5, 2010). "Industrial Redundant Network" (PDF). Singapore BICSI conference. Retrieved August 17, 2013.
4. "HiOS - Hirschmann™ Operating System". Web site. Hirschmann a Belden Brand. Archived from the original on May 12, 2013. Retrieved August 17, 2013.
5. "Fast Ethernet DIN Rail switch 8-9 ports". Product page. Belden. Retrieved August 17, 2013.
6. "PROFINET Open Industrial Ethernet standard for automation" (PDF). Omron. October 12, 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 16, 2011. Retrieved August 17, 2013.
7. "IEC 62439-2:2021. Industrial communication networks - High availability automation networks - Part 2: Media Redundancy Protocol (MRP)". International Electrotechnical Commission. IEC Webstore. Retrieved 8 July 2025.