An Infrastructure for Enabling Dynamic Fault Tolerance in Highly-Reliable Adaptive Distributed Embedded Systems Based on Switched Ethernet

Alberto Ballesteros; Manuel Barranco; Julián Proenza; Luís Almeida; Francisco Pozo; Pere Palmer-Rodríguez

doi:10.3390/s22187099

An Infrastructure for Enabling Dynamic Fault Tolerance in Highly-Reliable Adaptive Distributed Embedded Systems Based on Switched Ethernet

Sensors (Basel). 2022 Sep 19;22(18):7099. doi: 10.3390/s22187099.

Authors

Alberto Ballesteros¹, Manuel Barranco¹, Julián Proenza¹, Luís Almeida^{2

3}, Francisco Pozo⁴, Pere Palmer-Rodríguez¹

Affiliations

¹ Departament de Matemàtiques i Informàtica, Universitat Illes Balears, 07122 Palma de Mallorca, Spain.
² CISTER Research Center in Real-Time and Embedded Computing Systems, 4200-135 Porto, Portugal.
³ FEUP Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto, 4200-465 Porto, Portugal.
⁴ Hitachi Energy, 72226 Vasteras, Sweden.

Abstract

Distributed Embedded Systems (DESs) carrying out critical tasks must be highly reliable and hard in real-time. Moreover, to operate in dynamic operational contexts in an effective and efficient manner, they must also be adaptive. Adaptivity is particularly interesting from a dependability perspective, as it can be used to develop dynamic fault tolerance mechanisms, which, in combination with static ones, make it possible to provide better and more efficient fault tolerance. However, constructing a DES with such complexity presents many challenges. This is because all the mechanisms that support fault tolerance, real-time, and adaptivity must be designed to operate in a coordinated manner. This paper presents the Dynamic Fault Tolerance for Flexible Time-Triggered Ethernet (DFT4FTT), a self-reconfigurable infrastructure for implementing highly reliable adaptive DES. Here, we describe the design of its hardware and software architecture and the main set of mechanisms, with a focus on fault tolerance.

Keywords: DFT4FTT; adaptivity; dependability; distributed; dynamic fault tolerance; embedded; fault tolerance; reliability; resilience.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grant TEC2015-70313-R (Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competividad), by FEDER funding, by grant PID2021-124348OB-I00 funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/ERDF, EU. Luís Almeida was supported by the Portuguese government through FCT-MCTES within the CISTER Research Unit (UIDB/04234/2020).