Low-Cost Error Containment and Recovery for Onboard Guarded Software Upgrading and Beyond
IEEE Transactions on Computers - Special issue on fault-tolerant embedded systems
Synergistic Coordination between Software and Hardware Fault Tolerance Techniques
DSN '01 Proceedings of the 2001 International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (formerly: FTCS)
Operational anomalies as a cause of safety-critical requirements evolution
Journal of Systems and Software
Performance Evaluation - Dependable systems and networks-performance and dependability symposium (DSN-PDS) 2002: Selected papers
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To assure dependable onboard evolution, we have developed a methodology called guarded software upgrading (GSU). In this paper, we focus on a low-cost approach to error containment and recovery for GSU. To ensure low development cost, we exploit inherent system resource redundancies as the fault tolerance means. In order to mitigate the effect of residual software faults at low performance cost, we take a crucial step in devising error containment and recovery methods by introducing the 驴confidence-driven驴 notion. This notion complements the message-driven (or 驴communication-induced驴) approach employed by a number of existing checkpointing protocols for tolerating hardware faults. In particular, we discriminate between the individual software components with respect to our confidence in their reliability, and keep track of changes of our confidence (due to knowledge about potential process state contamination) in particular processes. This, in turn, enables the individual processes in the spaceborne distributed system to make decisions locally, at run-time, on whether to establish a checkpoint upon message passing and whether to roll back or roll forward during error recovery. The resulting message-driven confidence-driven approach enables cost-effective checkpointing and cascading-rollback free recovery.