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Software Redundancy

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Fault-Tolerant Design

Abstract

There are two types of software fault tolerance techniques: single version and multi version. Single version techniques aim to improve the fault tolerance of a software component by adding to it mechanisms for fault detection, containment, and recovery. Multi-version techniques use redundant software components which are developed following design diversity rules. As in the hardware case, various choices have to be examined to determine at which level the redundancy has to be provided and which modules are to be made redundant. One has to be aware that the increase in complexity caused by redundancy can be quite severe and may diminish the dependability improvement, unless redundant resources are allocated in a proper way. In this chapter, we consider common single-version and multi-version software fault tolerance techniques, including checkpoint and restart, recovery blocks, n-version programming, and n self-checking programming. We also briefly cover software testing and common test coverage metrics.

“Programs are really not much more than the programmer’s best guess about what a system should do.” Russel Abbot.

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  1. KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Forum 120, 164 40, Krista, Sweden

    Elena Dubrova

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  1. Elena Dubrova
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Correspondence to Elena Dubrova .

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Dubrova, E. (2013). Software Redundancy. In: Fault-Tolerant Design. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2113-9_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2113-9_7

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