A standby-sparing technique with low energy-overhead for fault-tolerant hard real-time systems

Time redundancy (rollback-recovery) and hardware redundancy are commonly used in real-time systems to achieve fault tolerance. From an energy consumption point of view, time redundancy is generally more preferable than hardware redundancy. However, hard real-time systems often use hardware redundancy to meet high reliability requirements of safety-critical applications. In this paper we propose a hardware-redundancy technique with low energy-overhead for hard real-time systems. The proposed technique is based on standby-sparing, where the system is composed of a primary unit and a spare. Through analytical models, we have developed an online energy-management method which uses a slack reclamation scheme to reduce the energy consumption of both the primary and spare units. In this method, dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is used for the primary unit and dynamic power management (DPM) is used for the spare. We conducted several experiments to compare the proposed system with a fault-tolera...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CODES
• Authors: Alireza Ejlali, Bashir M. Al-Hashimi, Petru Eles
• Keywords: CODES 2009, Energy Consumption, Hard Real-time Systems, Hardware-Software Codesign, Real-time Systems