Immunotronics - novel finite-state-machine architectures with built-in self-test using self-nonself differentiation

A novel approach to hardware fault tolerance is demonstrated that takes inspiration from the human immune system as a method of fault detection. The human immune system is a remarkable system of interacting cells and organs that protect the body from invasion and maintains reliable operation even in the presence of invading bacteria or viruses. This paper seeks to address the field of electronic hardware fault tolerance from an immunological perspective with the aim of showing how novel methods based upon the operation of the immune system can both complement and create new approaches to the development of fault detection mechanisms for reliable hardware systems. In particular, it is shown that by use of partial matching, as prevalent in biological systems, high fault coverage can be achieved with the added advantage of reducing memory requirements. The development of a generic finite-state-machine immunization procedure is discussed that allows any system that can be represented in such a manner to be "immunized" against the occurrence of faulty operation. This is demonstrated by the creation of an immunized decade counter that can detect the presence of faults in real tim

FADI: a fault-tolerant environment for open distributed computing

FADI is a complete programming environment that serves the reliable execution of distributed application programs. FADI encompasses all aspects of modern fault-tolerant distributed computing. The built-in user-transparent error detection mechanism covers processor node crashes and hardware transient failures. The mechanism also integrates user-assisted error checks into the system failure model. The nucleus non-blocking checkpointing mechanism combined with a novel selective message logging technique delivers an efficient, low-overhead backup and recovery mechanism for distributed processes. FADI also provides means for remote automatic process allocation on the distributed system nodes

Formal proofs for broadcast algorithms

Standard distributed algorithmic solutions to recurring distributed problems are commonly specified and described informally. A proper understanding of these distributed algorithms that clarifies ambiguities requires formal descriptions. However, formalisation tends to yield complex descriptions. We formally study two broadcast algorithms and present an encoding framework using a process descriptive language and formalise these algorithms and their specifications using this framework. Following these new formal encodings we discuss correctness proofs for the same algorithms.peer-reviewe

Self-Healing Protocols for Connectivity Maintenance in Unstructured Overlays

In this paper, we discuss on the use of self-organizing protocols to improve the reliability of dynamic Peer-to-Peer (P2P) overlay networks. Two similar approaches are studied, which are based on local knowledge of the nodes' 2nd neighborhood. The first scheme is a simple protocol requiring interactions among nodes and their direct neighbors. The second scheme adds a check on the Edge Clustering Coefficient (ECC), a local measure that allows determining edges connecting different clusters in the network. The performed simulation assessment evaluates these protocols over uniform networks, clustered networks and scale-free networks. Different failure modes are considered. Results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal.Comment: The paper has been accepted to the journal Peer-to-Peer Networking and Applications. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s12083-015-0384-

An approach to rollback recovery of collaborating mobile agents

Fault-tolerance is one of the main problems that must be resolved to improve the adoption of the agents' computing paradigm. In this paper, we analyse the execution model of agent platforms and the significance of the faults affecting their constituent components on the reliable execution of agent-based applications, in order to develop a pragmatic framework for agent systems fault-tolerance. The developed framework deploys a communication-pairs independent check pointing strategy to offer a low-cost, application-transparent model for reliable agent- based computing that covers all possible faults that might invalidate reliable agent execution, migration and communication and maintains the exactly-one execution property

Software Defined Networks based Smart Grid Communication: A Comprehensive Survey

The current power grid is no longer a feasible solution due to ever-increasing user demand of electricity, old infrastructure, and reliability issues and thus require transformation to a better grid a.k.a., smart grid (SG). The key features that distinguish SG from the conventional electrical power grid are its capability to perform two-way communication, demand side management, and real time pricing. Despite all these advantages that SG will bring, there are certain issues which are specific to SG communication system. For instance, network management of current SG systems is complex, time consuming, and done manually. Moreover, SG communication (SGC) system is built on different vendor specific devices and protocols. Therefore, the current SG systems are not protocol independent, thus leading to interoperability issue. Software defined network (SDN) has been proposed to monitor and manage the communication networks globally. This article serves as a comprehensive survey on SDN-based SGC. In this article, we first discuss taxonomy of advantages of SDNbased SGC.We then discuss SDN-based SGC architectures, along with case studies. Our article provides an in-depth discussion on routing schemes for SDN-based SGC. We also provide detailed survey of security and privacy schemes applied to SDN-based SGC. We furthermore present challenges, open issues, and future research directions related to SDN-based SGC.Comment: Accepte