Reliability Analysis of a Class of Fault-tolerant Systems

In many critical applications of digital systems, fault tolerance has been an essential architectural attribute for achieving high reliability. We propose an architecture called the digital-data system to increase the reliability of a class of communication and network control systems. A general expression for the reliability of this system is derived using the total probability theorem, and the issue of minimizing the system cost is discussed. The architecture is quite general in that it models software Fault-tolerant systems such as the recovery block scheme. Other software fault-tolerance schemes like the deadline mechanism for real-time recovery can also be modeled using our technique. A numerical example illustrates the technique.