Ultra-reliable communication architectures (Alfons Geser, NIA)

Abstract: The certification authorities for civil avionics require that airborne electronic hardware has a proven failure rate of less than 10^-9 per hour. This is far below currect hardware fault rates (~ 10^-6 per hour), so the hardware must stay functional even in the presence of a few faults: it must be fault-tolerant.

I will give an introduction to the subject of fault-tolerant communication, including

• faults, their severity and their effects,
• means to assure functionality in spite of faults, and
  
• properties and requirements on the system that enable one to reason about its fault-tolerant services in a rigorous mathematical way.

I will present the ROBUS, developed in the SPIDER project at NASA Langley, as an instance of a fault-tolerant communication network.

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This is an abstract of a talk to be presented at the 2004 SEAMS Workshop in Charleston, SC. For more information, visit the workshop's homepage at math.cofc.edu/SEAMS.