A Light-Weight Fault Tolerance Framework for Space Computing using COTS Components

Abstract:
The exponential growth in computational demand in modern space computers coupled with cost and power constraints mandate the usage of commercial off the shelf (COTS) components, and innovative mitigation techniques against radiation effects in COTS components are needed. In this paper we present a framework for the rapid development of dependable embedded computers for space exploration, where system-level virtualization is exploited to implement time redundancy. Moreover, an ad-hoc hardware module in charge of integrity checking is proposed that interacts with the virtualized system. Several experimental results are reported showing the effectiveness of the proposed framework, as well as the overheads it introduces.