An N-Modular Redundancy Framework Incorporating Response-Time Analysis on Multiprocessor Platforms

Abstract

A timing constraint and a high level of reliability are the fundamental requirements for designing hard real-time systems. To support both requirements, the N modular redundancy (NMR) technique as a fault-tolerant real-time scheduling has been proposed, which executes identical copies for each task simultaneously on multiprocessor platforms, and a single correct one is voted on, if any. However, this technique can compromise the schedulability of the target system during improving reliability because it produces N identical copies of each job that execute in parallel on multiprocessor platforms, and some tasks may miss their deadlines due to the enlarged computing power required for completing their executions. In this paper, we propose task-level N modular redundancy (TL-NMR), which improves the system reliability of the target system of which tasks are scheduled by any fixed-priority (FP) scheduling without schedulability loss. Based on experimental results, we demonstrate that TL-NMR maintains the schedulability, while significantly improving average system safety compared to the existing NMR.

Keywords

• hard real-time systems
• schedulability
• reliability
• N modular redundancy
• multiprocessor platform
• fixed-priority scheduling