Adapting distributed voting algorithms for secure real-time embedded systems

Information assurance in real-time application settings requires dealing with extreme failure behaviors at the infrastructure level such as data corruptions by malicious processes and message timeliness violations in the network. Functional replication is employed to deal with such failures, with voting among the replica nodes to move correct pieces of data through the application-level subsystems. The goal is to develop a voting machinery that dynamically adjusts its internal mechanisms to deal with various types of failures. We present the design issues, with considerations of protocol correctness and performance engineering. A goal is to reduce the message overhead - and hence the power drain on wireless connected processes. The protocol is highly adaptive to deal with various types of failures occurring at the infrastructure level, in meeting the goal.