On Low-Cost Error Containment and Recovery Methods for Guarded Software Upgrading

To assure dependable onboard evolution, we have developed a methodology called guarded software upgrading (GSU). In this paper, we focus on a low-cost approach to error containment and recovery for GSU. To ensure low development cost, we exploit inherent system resource redundancies as the fault tolerance means. In order to mitigate the effect of residual software faults at low performance cost, we take a crucial step in devising error containment and recovery methods by introducing the “confidencedriven” notion. This notion complements the message-driven (or “communication-induced”) approach employed by a number of existing checkpointing protocols for tolerating hardware faults. In particular, we discriminate between the individual software components with respect to our confidence in their reliability, and keep track of changes of our confidence (due to knowledge about potential process state contamination) in particular processes. This, in turn, enables the individual pr...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ICDCS
• Authors: Ann T. Tai, Kam S. Tso, Leon Alkalai, Savio N. Chau, William H. Sanders
• Keywords: Dependable Onboard Evolution, Distributed And Parallel Computing, Error Containment, ICDCS 2000, Residual Software Faults