Comparison of Different Methods Making Use of Backup Copies for Fault-Tolerant Scheduling on Embedded Multiprocessor Systems

As transistors scale down, systems are more vulnerable to faults. Their reliability consequently becomes the main concern, especially in safety-critical applications such as automotive sector, aeronautics or nuclear plants. Many methods have already been introduced to conceive fault-tolerant systems and therefore improve the reliability. Nevertheless, several of them are not suitable for real-time embedded systems since they incur significant overheads, other methods may be less intrusive but at the cost of being too specific to a dedicated system. The aim of this paper is to analyse a method making use of two task copies when on-line scheduling tasks on multiprocessor systems. This method can guarantee the system reliability without causing too much overhead and requiring any special hardware components. In addition, it remains general and thus applicable to large amount of systems. Last but not least, this paper studies two techniques of processor allocation policies: the exhaustive search and the first found solution search. It is shown that the exhaustive search is not necessary for efficient fault-tolerant scheduling and that the latter search significantly reduces the computation complexity, which is interesting for embedded systems.