A Period-Based Group Membership Strategy for Nodes of TDMA Networks

Group membership provides strong guarantees for safety-critical fieldbus systems. However, using a single group for all messages provides an unnecessarily high risk of temporary node outages in the face of transient faults. Using groups based on virtual nodes that are divided by message period can increase the availability for the most critical, high-speed network messages with potentially reasonable bandwidth cost and without giving up the assurances of strong group membership algorithms.