A Fault-Tolerant Scheduling Algorithm Based on Checkpointing and Redundancy for Distributed Real-Time Systems

Abstract

Real-time systems are becoming ever more widely used in life-critical applications, and the need for fault-tolerant scheduling can only grow in the years ahead. This article presents a novel fault tolerance approach for tolerating transient faults in hard real-time systems. The proposed approach combines both checkpointing with rollback and active replication to tolerate several transient faults. Based on this approach, a new static fault-tolerant scheduling algorithm SFTS is presented. It is based on a list of scheduling heuristics which satisfy the application time constraints even in the presence of faults by exploring the spare capacity of available processors in the architecture. Simulation results show the performance and effectiveness of the proposed approach compared to other fault-tolerant approaches. The results reveal that in the presence of multiple transient faults, the average timing overhead of this approach is lower than checkpointing technique. Moreover, the proposed algorithm SFTS achieves better feasibility rate in the presence of multiple transient faults.