Complex Patterns of Failure: Fault Tolerance via Complex Event Processing for IoT Systems

Fault-tolerance (FT) support is a key challenge for ensuring dependable Internet of Things (IoT) systems. Many existing FT-support mechanisms for IoT are static, tightly coupled, and inflexible, and so they struggle to provide effective support for dynamic IoT environments. This paper proposes Complex Patterns of Failure (CPoF), an approach to providing FT support for IoT systems using Complex Event Processing (CEP) that promotes modularity and reusability in FT-support design. System defects are defined using our Vulnerabilities, Faults, and Failures (VFF) framework, and error-detection strategies are defined as nondeterministic finite automata (NFA) implemented via CEP systems. We evaluated CPoF on an automated agriculture system and demonstrated its effectiveness against three types of error-detection checks: reasonableness, timing, and reversal. Using CPoF, we identified unreasonable environmental conditions and performance degradation via sensor data analysis.