Experimental Dependability Evaluation of the Artk68-FT Real-time Kernel

Paper in proceeding, 2004

This paper presents an experimental dependability evaluation of a small real-time kernel called Artk68-FT intended for distributed fault-tolerant real-time systems. A main goal of this research is to improve the dependability of such systems by using a two-level approach for tolerating transient faults. By providing mechanisms in the kernel for tolerating transient faults at the node level, the overall reliability is improved since the recovery time is much shorter at the node level than at the system level. Permanent faults and transient faults that cannot be handled at the node level have to be handled at the system level. The experimental evaluation was performed using fault injection experiments on the MC68340 microcontroller executing the kernel and three application tasks. The experimental results show that no wrong results were produced when faults were injected during execution of a critical task protected by Artk68-FT. Moreover, no application crashes were observed in the fault injection experiments with Artk68-FT compared to experiments with a version of the kernel without fault handling mechanisms.