Fault Tolerant Distributed Architectures for In-Vehicular Networks

The increasing trend of automotive electronics mandates the introduction of multiple processors in automotive electronics. The automotive electronic systems have to operate in harsh environments having a high temperature range, high humidity, unpredictable vibrations and rapid voltage variation. In such environment, the automotive electronic systems become vulnerable to intermittent and transient failures. Depending upon the importance of the tasks performed by the processor, a processor’s failure inside automotive electronic system may lead to serious consequences. Fault tolerant computing techniques are used to keep the computer systems running in spite of one or more processors’ failures. The concept of fault tolerant is well known in many applications such as airplanes, industry, and military. However, the question of fault tolerant design has drawn little attention in automotive electronics. In this paper, various fault tolerant architectures for automotive applications have been proposed. In these schemes, fault tolerant is achieved by assigning the task of a failing processor to another processor in the system. In this way, the automotive electronic system may continue to function with multiple processors’ failure.