Enhancing Software Reliability Against Soft Error Using Critical Data Model

Abstract

In modern life, software plays an increasingly important role and ensuring the reliability of software is of particular importance. In space, a Single Event Upset occurs because of the strong radiation effects of cosmic rays, which can lead to errors in software. In order to guarantee the reliability of software, many software-based fault tolerance methods have been proposed. The majority of them are based on data redundancy, which duplicates all data to prevent data corruption during the software execution. But this fault tolerant approach will make the data redundant and increase memory overhead and time overhead. Duplicating critical variables only can significantly reduce the memory and performance overheads, while still guaranteeing very high reliable results in terms of fault-tolerance improvement. In this paper, we propose an analysis model, named CDM (Critical Data Model), which can compute the critical of variables in the programs and achieve the purpose of reducing redundancy for the reliable program. According to the experimental results, the model proposed in this paper can enhance the reliability of the software, reduce the time and memory cost, and improve the efficiency of the reliable program.