FPGA-Based Reliable Video Sensor in NCS

Recently, FPGA-based NCS applications have been widely used. Industrial environments have a lot of electromagnetic interference which may induce transient and permanent faults. As a result, Fault-Tolerant FPGA based NCS applications are required. In this paper, an NCS model composed of a combination of S2A architecture and In-Loop architecture connected to each other through Ethernet switch, is described. The S2A part of the model is an FPGA-based video sensor network which requires protection against transient faults. Several Fault-Tolerant techniques are mentioned in the literature for protection. Two Fault-Tolerant techniques are under study which are Hot Standby and Sift-Out. The fault model used is Single Event Upsets (SEUs). Dynamic Partial Recovery is used. Markov Models are used for reliability calculations. Results show that even though the Sift-Out technique is more reliable than Hot Standby, there may be situations where the difference in reliability cannot justify the extra cost. Keywords— Fault-Tolerant; Networked Control Systems; S2A; In-Loop; FPGAs; Reliability; Dynamic Partial Reconfiguration; Hot Standby; Sift-Out; Markov Model.