Aspect-oriented fault tolerance for real-time embedded systems

Abstract

Real-time embedded systems for safety-critical applications have to introduce fault tolerance mechanisms in order to cope with hardware and software errors. Fault tolerance is usually applied by means of redundancy and diversity. Redundant hardware implies the establishment of a distributed system executing a set of fault tolerance strategies by software, and may also employ some form of diversity, by using different variants or versions for the same processing. This paper describes our approach to introduce fault tolerance in distributed embedded systems applications, using aspect-oriented programming (AOP). A real-time operating system sup-porting middleware thread communication was integrated to a fault tolerant framework. The introduction of fault tolerance in the system is performed by AOP at the application thread level. The advantages of this approach include higher modularization, less efforts for legacy systems evolution and better configurability for testing and product line development. This work has been tested and evaluated successfully in several fault tolerant configurations and presented no significant performance or memory footprint costs.