Fault-Tolerant Regularity-Based Real-Time Virtual Resources

Many safety-critical applications employ embedded real-time systems where both timing and fault tolerance requirements must be continually satisfied. The Regularity-based Resource Partition Model (RRP), which is known for its code level independence between resource level and task level, is used to schedule resource partitions in virtualized real-time systems. This paper presents a fault tolerance model for Regularity-based Real-Time Virtual Resources to recover from transient hardware faults without modifying user applications. The proposed framework consists of a checkpointing mechanism called Fault-Tolerant RRP with a checkpointing partition followed by a redundancy partition prepared for re-execution to satisfy task deadlines despite the occurrence of faults. The frequency of checkpoints and the number of time slices in the redundancy partition are parameterized by the fault rate of the hardware resource and the sum of the availability factors of the original partition sets. Extensive theoretical analysis and simulation-based experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed framework while incurring minimal overhead.