Appropriate consistent replicated voting for increased reliability in a node replication scheme over FTT

In the context of critical applications there is an increasing interest in having Distributed Embedded Systems (DESs) that are able to operate in dynamic environments, while at the same time reaching a high reliability. The Flexible Time-Triggered communication paradigm (FTT) is designed to support the QoS and real-time requirements of the traffic of these systems. However, FTT does not provide fault tolerance. This paper explains our on-going work towards designing a consistent and highly-reliable voting protocol which supports node replication on DESs that use FTT switched Ethernet. In particular, we propose a protocol for the node replicas to vote consistently on messages exchanged through an FTT Ethernet network that uses time redundancy, while trying to maximize the reliability that can be achieved thanks to the redundancy of the nodes and the communication subsystem itself.