The IEC 62439 series is applicable to high-availability automation networks based on the Ethernet technology.

This document:
- specifies PRP and HSR as two related redundancy protocols designed to provide seamless recovery in case of single failure of an inter-bridge link or bridge in the network, which are based on the same scheme: parallel transmission of duplicated information;
- specifies the operation of the precision time protocol (PTP) in networks that implement the two redundancy protocols (Annex A);
- specifies PTP profiles with performance suitable for power utilty automation (Annex B) and industrial automation (Annex C);
- includes for better understanding a tutorial (Annex D) on the PTP features effectively used in high-availability automation networks;
- includes a management information base for PTP (Annex E);
- defines a conformance test suite for the above protocols (Annex F).