Fault-Tolerant Architecture for Networked Control Systems with High-Quality Video Supervision Using FPGA-Enhanced Switches

This paper presents an enhanced fault-tolerant architecture for industrial Networked Control Systems (NCS) that simultaneously supports supervision video transmission and maintains strict real-time constraints. Building upon previous work that optimized video and control data flows through static traffic management techniques, this study introduces approaches to address fault tolerance and scalability challenges. First, supervision video enhanced quality operating up to the standard 50 frames per second (fps) was tested. Second the use of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) resources embedded within the core network switch to handle controller fault recovery locally is proposed and tested. The use of this FPGA-enhanced architecture effectively isolates control and video traffic, ensuring real-time responsiveness even with supervisory cameras operating at high frame rates. Simulation results confirm maximum delays in faulty scenarios, well within the real-time requirements. The proposed solutions demonstrate possible scalable methods for integrating fault tolerance and high-quality video supervision in modern industrial NCS, with the FPGA-based design offering latency improvements of 7.58% over previously studied designs.