The transparent implementation of fault tolerance in the time-triggered architecture

The time-triggered architecture (TTA) is a novel architecture for the implementation of fault-tolerant distributed hard real-time systems. The TTA is interface driven, i.e., the different subsystems are encapsulated between interfaces that are fully specified in the value domain and in the time domain at design time. We introduce a new interface that hides all services that are required for the implementation of fault tolerance from the host processors that perform the application functions. Since this new interface corresponds syntactically and semantically to the existing communication interface of the time-triggered protocol (TTP) controller, existing software can be ported to a fault-tolerant configuration with minimal modifications.