Efficient fault protection of block gradient-based adaptive filters

Adaptive FIR filters are important in modern digital signal processing applications, and many situations require significant computational power attainable only through multi-processor configurations. Various block processing techniques have been proposed as viable alternatives to the sequential implementations to achieve the high throughput rate and reduce the effect of finite word length. While there are algorithm-based fault-tolerant techniques for protecting general digital signal processing systems against temporary/permanent failures, the specific features and requirements of the adaptive filtering systems have been largely ignored in the fault tolerance literature. By identifying common operations among different block adaptive filtering algorithms, however most operations of a particular algorithm can be protected with reasonably low-cost. We present a fine-grained approach, a highly efficient implementation of the well-known checksum encoding scheme, for protecting block adaptive filters. Through properly partitioning the input data, checksums for a parallel adaptive FIR filter can be calculated with reduced complexity. Computational and hardware overhead of the proposed scheme are analyzed, and shown to be proportional to the total number of partitioned submatrices