Integration and Comparison of Three Physical Fault Injection Techniques

This paper describes and compares three physical fault injection techniques—heavy-ion radiation, pin-level injection, and electromagnetic interference—and their use in the validation of MARS, a fault-tolerant distributed real-time system. The main features of the injection techniques are first summarised and analysed, and then the MARS error detection mechanisms are described. The distributed testbed set-up and the common test scenario implemented to perform a coherent set of experiments by applying the three fault injection techniques are also described. The results are presented and discussed; special emphasis is put on the comparison of the specific impact of each technique.