Software-Based Fault Tolerance: Towards New Advances for COTS-Based Embedded Systems

Embedded systems with high dependability requirements have to satisfy ever-growing demands for high computing performance, number of implemented features and cost-efficiency. This leads to a move to commercial off-the-shelf hardware components. At the same time, the number of faults in embedded systems increases due to shrinking hardware feature sizes and increasing software complexity. In order to create dependable software-intense systems, we propose reliability-aware software development to create systems with high inherent fault masking capabilities. Therefore, appropriate fault injection techniques for assessing the fault tolerance at various development stages are needed. Furthermore, we investigate in diverse compiling as a cost-efficient method to efficiently exploit redundancy. Finally, we propose to examine potential benefits of dynamic automated diversity techniques proposed to increase the security of systems, regarding their capabilities to increase the fault tolerance regarding commoncause faults in redundant systems.