Fault coverage of a timing and control flow checker for hard real-time systems

Dependability is a crucial requirement of today's embedded systems. To achieve a higher level of fault tolerance, it is necessary to develop and integrate mechanisms for a reliable fault detection. In the context of hard real-time computing, such a mechanism should also guarantee correct timing behavior, an essential requirement for these systems. In this paper, we present results of the fault coverage of a lightweight timing and control flow checker for hard real-time systems. An experimental evaluation shows that more than 30% of injected faults can be detected by our technique, while the number of errors leading to an endless loop is reduced by around 80 %. The check mechanism causes only very low overhead concerning additional memory usage (15.0% on average) and execution time (12.2% on average).