Fault tolerance and network integrity measures: the case of computer-based systems

Fault tolerance is a key aspect of the dependability of complex computer-based systems. Fault tolerance may be difficult to measure directly in complex real world systems, and we propose here to measure it in terms of integrity preservation of the system under the assumption of a particular fault occurrence distribution. We measure the integrity preservation ability of the system by measuring the change of structural integrity of the graph representing the system while it is exposed to random node removal according to the assumed fault distribution. We show how to use such measures to measure the integrity reservation of computer-based systems and in this way indirectly their fault tolerance. We discuss the application of the proposed method in the context of a real world example, the Linux operating system. The results indicate that integrity preservation metrics can serve as an appropriate measure of fault tolerance of complex computer-based systems.