Cross-layer Resilience Mechanisms to Protect the Communication Path in Embedded Systems

With the decreasing feature size of new chip generations, additional protection mechanism are necessary especially to protect safety-critical systems in environments with higher radiation levels. This paper investigates a cross-layer approach combining hardware and software-level techniques into a complementary protection mechanism. This reduces overhead by avoiding overlapping protection without reducing the fault tolerance. The paper starts by introducing one software and one hardware protection mechanism. Then, we discuss the overlap as well as pros and cons of both techniques. Finally, we give an outlook about possible benefits to combine both independent approaches to one cross-layer resilience mechanism.