ESTABLISHMENT OF ISOLATED FAILURE IMMUNE REAL-TIME CHANNELS IN HARTS

Fault-tolerant, real-time communication in distributed systems is very important yet difficult to achieve. Traditional protocols like the TC P/IP achieve reliable communication through acknowledgment and retrans mission schemes, where one achieves the reliability at the cost of per formance. In this paper, we discuss how both the timeliness and fault- tolerance of communication can be achieved by using the concept of rea l-time channel [1] and exploring the inherent spatial redundancy of a given network topology. Specifically, we show how isolated failure imm une real-time channels can be established in wrapped hexagonal mesh ne tworks, thus ensuring timely delivery of messages in the presence of n etwork component failures as long as the failures are isolated. This k ind of fault-tolerance cannot be achieved with other commonly-known to pologies like rings, rectangular meshes, and hypercubes. The proposed approach is to be implemented in an experimental distributed real-time system, called HARTS [2], whose construction is underway.