RI-COTS: Trading performance for reliability improvements in commercial of the shelf systems

The flexibility of software-based fault tolerant approaches in providing the required level of reliability Commercial-Off-The Shelf (COTS) devices made them the first choice in designing safety-critical systems. In this paper, we propose a reliability improvement method for COTS-based systems, so-called, RI-COTS. The main idea behind RI-COTS is to establish a tradeoff between reliability and performance of COTS system through controlling redundant execution at instruction level. RI-COTS is implemented on LEON2 processor VHDL model. Our simulation results show that comparing with the most related studies, RI-COTS can improve the fault detection capability by 20% with only 4% performance overhead.