An Active Replication Scheme that Tolerates Failures in Distributed Embedded Real-Time Systems

Embedded real-time systems are being increasingly used in a major part of critical applications. In these systems, critical real-time constraints must be satisfied even in the presence of failures. In this paper, we present a new method-based on graph transformation that introduces fault-tolerance in building embedded real-time systems. The proposed method targets distributed architecture and can tolerate a fixed number of arbitrary processors and communication links failures. Because of the resource limitation in embedded systems, our method uses a software-based replication technique to provide fault-tolerance. Finally, since we use graph transformation to perform replication, our method may be used by any off-line distribution-scheduling algorithm to generate a fault-tolerant distributed schedule.