Fault tolerance in finite state machines using fusion

  • Authors:

  • Bharath Balasubramanian;Vinit Ogale;Vijay K. Garg

  • Affiliations:

  • Parallel and Distributed Systems Laboratory, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin;Parallel and Distributed Systems Laboratory, Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin;IBM India Research Lab, Delhi

  • Venue:
  • ICDCN'08 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Distributed computing and networking
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Given a set of n different deterministic finite state machines (DFSMs), we examine the problem of tolerating k faults among them. The traditional approach to this problem involves replication, requiring n.k backup DFSMs. For example, given two state machines, say A and B, to tolerate two faults, this approach maintains two copies each of A and B, thus resulting in a total of six DFSMs in the system. In this paper, we question the optimality of such an approach and present another approach based on the 'fusion' of state machines allowing for more eÆcient backups. We introduce the theory of fusion machines and provide an algorithm which can generate fusion machines corresponding to a given set of machines. Further, we have implemented this algorithm and tested it for various examples. It is important to note that our approach requires only k backup DFSMs, as opposed to the n.k backup DFSMs required by the replication approach.