Applying fault-tolerance on multi-microcontroller system with RTOS

Abstract

This paper proposes a design of fault-tolerance technology, combined with a Real-Time Operation System (RTOS), applied to a multi-microcontroller system. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the above issue via an embedded system with a “fault-tolerance” on a FreeRTOS kernel and driven by a multi-microcontroller system. A simple protocol that used to communicate between microcontrollers is USART with the feature of a high-speed baud rate at 10.5 Mbit/s. Sift-out modular redundancy, one of hybrid redundancy techniques in fault-tolerance algorithm has applied in this work. The experiments covered two types of faults; Slave Fault and Master Fault. The results showed that faults occurred in the proposed multi-microcontroller system can be detected and recovered in order to finish the whole assigned process.