On Building A Scalable Real Time Fault Tolerant System For Embedded Applications

Real-time embedded systems have evolved during the past several decades from small custom-designed digital hardware to large distributed processing systems. As these systems become more complex, their interoperability, evolvability and cost-effectiveness requirements motivate the use of the commercial-off-the-shelf components. This raises the challenge of constructing dependable and predictable real-time services for application developers on top of the inexpensive hardware and software components which has minimal support for timeliness and dependability guarantees. We are addressing this challenge in the ARMADA project. ARMADA is a set of communication and middleware services that provide support for fault-tolerance and end-to-end guarantees for embedded real-time distributed applications. Since real-time performance of such applications depends heavily on the communication subsystem, the first thrust of the project is to develop a predictable communication service and architecture to ensure QoS-sensitive message delivery. In its second thrust, ARMADA aims to offload the complexity of developing fault-tolerance applications from the application programmer by focusing on a collection of modular, composable middleware for fault-tolerance group communication and replication under timing constraints. Finally, we develop tools for testing and validating the behavior of our services.