Fault Tolerance in Real-Time Systems: A Review

Abstract

Real-time systems are safety/mission critical computing systems which behave deterministically, and gives correct reactions to the inputs (or changes in the physical environment) in a timely manner. As in all computing systems, there is always a possibility of the presence of some faults in real time systems. Due to the its time critical missions a fault-tolerance mechanism should be constructed. Fault tolerance can be achieved by hardware, software or time redundancy and especially in safety-critical applications. There are strict time and cost constraints, which should be satisfied. This leaves us to the situation where constraints should be satisfied and at the same time, faults should be tolerated. In this paper, the basic concepts, terminology, history, features and techniques of fault tolerance approach on real-time systems, are detailed and related works are reviewed for composing a good resource for the researchers.