Low-Cost Error Containment and Recovery for Onboard Guarded Software Upgrading and Beyond

ÐMessage-driven confidence-driven (MDCD) error containment and recovery, a low-cost approach to mitigating the effect of software design faults in distributed embedded systems, is developed for onboard guarded software upgrading for deep-space missions. In this paper, we first describe and verify the MDCD algorithms in which we introduce the notion of ªconfidence-drivenº to complement the ªcommunication-inducedº approach employed by a number of existing checkpointing protocols to achieve error containment and recovery efficiency. We then conduct a model-based analysis to show that the algorithms ensure low performance overhead. Finally, we discuss the advantages of the MDCD approach and its potential utility as a general-purpose, low-cost software fault tolerance technique for distributed embedded computing.