Abstract
The probability of data corruption as a result of single event upsets (SEUs) increases as transistor sizes decrease. Software-based fault-tolerance can help offer protection against SEUs on Commercial off The Shelf (COTS) hardware. However, such fault tolerance relies on replication, for which there may be insufficient resources in resource-constrained environments. Systems in the weakly-hard real-time domain can tolerate some faults as a product of their domain. Combining both the need for fault-tolerance and the intrinsic ability to tolerate faults, we propose a new approach for applying fault-tolerance named strategy switching. Strategy switching minimizes the effective unmitigated fault-rate by switching which tasks are to be run under a fault-tolerance scheme at runtime. Our method does not require bounding the number of faults for a given number of consecutive iterations.
We show how our method improves the steady-state fault rate by analytically computing the rate for our test set of generated DAGs and comparing this against a static application of fault-tolerance. Finally, we validate our method using UPPAAL.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Asghari, S.A., Binesh Marvasti, M., Rahmani, A.M.: Enhancing transient fault tolerance in embedded systems through an OS task level redundancy approach. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 87 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2018.04.049
Bengtsson, J., Larsen, K., Larsson, F., Pettersson, P., Yi, W.: UPPAAL—a tool suite for automatic verification of real-time systems. In: Alur, R., Henzinger, T.A., Sontag, E.D. (eds.) HS 1995. LNCS, vol. 1066, pp. 232–243. Springer, Heidelberg (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0020949
Bernat, G., Burns, A., Liamosi, A.: Weakly hard real-time systems. IEEE Trans. Comput. 50(4), 308–321 (2001)
Broster, I., Burns, A., Rodriguez-Navas, G.: Timing analysis of real-time communication under electromagnetic interference. Real-Time Syst. 30(1–2), 55–81 (2005)
Bulychev, P., et al.: UPPAAL-SMC: statistical model checking for priced timed automata. arXiv e-prints (2012)
Chang, J., Reis, G.A., August, D.I.: Automatic instruction-level software-only recovery. IEEE (2006)
Chen, K.H., Bönninghoff, B., Chen, J.J., Marwedel, P.: Compensate or ignore? Meeting control robustness requirements through adaptive soft-error handling. In: LCTES 2016. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2016). https://doi.org/10.1145/2907950.2907952
Choi, H., Kim, H., Zhu, Q.: Job-class-level fixed priority scheduling of weakly-hard real-time systems (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/RTAS.2019.00028
Dick, R., Rhodes, D., Wolf, W.: TGFF: task graphs for free (1998). https://doi.org/10.1109/HSC.1998.666245
Gujarati, A., Nasri, M., Brandenburg, B.B.: Quantifying the resiliency of fail-operational real-time networked control systems. In: Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), vol. 106. Schloss Dagstuhl–Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik, Dagstuhl, Germany (2018). https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2018.16
Lyons, R.E., Vanderkulk, W.: The use of triple-modular redundancy to improve computer reliability. IBM J. Res. Dev. 6(2), 200–209 (1962)
Oz, I., Arslan, S.: A survey on multithreading alternatives for soft error fault tolerance. ACM Comput. Surv. 52, 1–38 (2019)
Pathan, R.M.: Fault-tolerant and real-time scheduling for mixed-criticality systems. Real-Time Syst. 50(4), 509–547 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-014-9202-z
Acknowledgments
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 871259 (ADMORPH project). We thank the reviewers for their suggestions on improving this paper.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Miedema, L., Grelck, C. (2022). Strategy Switching: Smart Fault-Tolerance for Weakly-Hard Resource-Constrained Real-Time Applications. In: Schlingloff, BH., Chai, M. (eds) Software Engineering and Formal Methods. SEFM 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13550. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17108-6_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17108-6_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-17107-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-17108-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)