Dynamic adaptation for fault tolerance and power management in embedded real-time systems

Abstract

Safety-critical embedded systems often operate in harsh environmental conditions that necessitate fault-tolerant computing techniques. In addition, many safety-critical systems execute real-time applications that require strict adherence to task deadlines. These embedded systems are also energy-constrained, since system lifetime is determined largely by the battery lifetime. In this paper, we investigate dynamic adaptation techniques based on checkpointing and dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) for fault tolerance and power management. We first present schedulability tests that provide the criteria under which checkpointing can provide fault tolerance and real-time guarantees. We then present an adaptive checkpointing scheme in which the checkpointing interval for a task is dynamically adjusted during execution, and checkpoints are inserted based not only on the available slack, but also on the occurrences of faults. Next, we combine adaptive checkpointing with DVS to achieve power reduction. Finally, we develop an adaptive checkpointing scheme for a set of multiple tasks in real-time systems. An offline preprocessing based on linear programming is used to determine the parameters that are provided as inputs to the online adaptive checkpointing procedure. Simulation results show that compared to previous methods, the proposed adaptive checkpointing approach increases the likelihood of timely task completion in the presence of faults. When combined with DVS, adaptive checkpointing also leads to considerable energy savings.