A Study on Important Considerations for Designing Fault Tolerant Systems

Abstract

— All the embedded and software systems should be reliable and should be operational even when the system is performing any tasks even in extreme conditions. So, in order to make a system continues operational, we intend the systems to be Fault Tolerant.Fault Tolerance is the ability to detect and recover from a fault that is happening or has already happened in either the software or hardware in the system in which the software is running in order to provide service in accordance with the specification. In order to adequately understand the Fault tolerance it is important to understand the nature of the problem that software is supposed to solve. Software faults are all design faults. The source of the problem being solely design faults is very different than almost any other system in which fault tolerance is a desired property. The software faults are the result of human error. In this, paper will discuss about the Architectural design of Fault Tolerant system, Redundancy, Application requirements which mainly intends to Software design, Synchronization Interface, Fault Detection logic and the modes of operation.Current software fault tolerance methods are based on traditional hardware fault tolerance. Firstly, we shall discuss the basic terminology which clearly explains about the different terms used in Fault Tolerance. And go on to discuss various fault tolerance design considerations