Abstract. Embedded systems for safety-critical applications often integrate multiple “functions” and must generally be fault-tolerant. These requirements lead to a need for mechanisms and services that provide protection against fault propagation and ease the construction of distributed fault-tolerant applications. A number of bus architectures have been developed to satisfy this need. This paper reviews the requirements on these architectures, the mechanisms employed, and the services provided. Four representative architectures (SAFEbusTM , SPIDER, TTA, and FlexRay) are briefly described.
John M. Rushby