Abstract:

Fault-tolerant, real-time communication is very important yet difficult to achieve. Traditional protocols like the TCP/IP achieve reliable communication through acknowledgment and retransmission schemes, where one gains the reliability at the cost of performance. In this paper, we discuss how this problem can be solved by using the concept of real-time channel and exploring the inherent spatial redundancy of a given network topology. Specifically, we will show how isolated failure immune real-time channels can be established in wrapped hexagonal mesh networks, thus ensuring timely delivery of messages in the presence of network component failures as long as the failures are isolated. This kind of fault-tolerance cannot be achieved with other commonly-known topologies like rings, rectangular meshes, and hypercubes. The proposed approach is to be implemented in an experimental distributed real-time system called HARTS.