Scheduling Fault Recovery Operations for Time-Critical Applications

This paper introduces algorithms for scheduling fault recovery operations on systems which must preserve the timing correctness of critical application tasks in the presence of faults. The algorithms are based on methods to reserve time for the processing of recovery tasks at the design stage. This allows recovery tasks to be scheduled with very low run-time overhead, complementing or reducing the need for hardware replication to support dependable operation. Although previous work has advocated the use of reservation methods, there exists no formal methodology for allocating such time. A methodology is developed which facilitates the difficult task of verifying the timing correctness of a desired reservation strategy. In addition, simulation results are presented which give insight into the effectiveness of different reservation strategies in averting timing failures under a variety of transient recovery loads.1

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