Evaluation of combined approaches to distributed software-based fault tolerance

Presents a feasibility study of two combined techniques for software fault tolerance in distributed systems. A probabilistic model for each technique is presented that represents a technique´s ability to recover from software and hardware faults that occur with arbitrary frequency. The goal is not to accurately predict the behavior of systems that employ these techniques, but rather to identify the strong and weak points of each approach under varying circumstances of dependability in both the system and the fault-tolerance components. An example study shows how these models can be used to understand the influence of component failures on the reliability of systems using these two approaches