Reliability analysis of a class of fault-tolerant systems

An architecture called the digital-data system is proposed to increase the reliability of a class of communication and network control systems. A general expression for the reliability of this system is derived using the total probability theorem, and the issue of minimizing the system cost is discussed. The architecture is quite general in that it models software fault-tolerant systems such as the recovery block scheme. Other software fault-tolerance schemes like the deadline mechanism for real-time recovery can also be modeled using this technique. A numerical example is given to illustrate the technique