Structure-Oriented Dependability Evaluation of Fault-Tolerant Protocols

Yinong Chen and Winfried Gorke
Inst. for Computer Design and Fault Tolerance, University of Karlsruhe
P.O. Box 6980, 76128 Karlsruhe, Germany

Abstract

Fault-tolerant protocols are special software components used to
maintain correct communication and computing in highly dependable distributed
systems. Before being put into use the correctness or dependability of a fault
tolerant protocol must be ensured. Based on a deterministic test strategy with
imperfect error correction, a quantified reliability model for fault-tolerant
protocols is proposed and investigated in this paper. The parameters of the
model can be estimated from the frequencies of the failures due to a single
design error and from the times between the failures due to different design
errors observed during testing.

Keywords: fault tolerance, testing, fault injection, software reliability,
evaluation, distributed system, protocol.