First experimental evaluation of the consistent replicated voting in the hard real-time ethernet switching architecture

Distributed Embedded Systems (DESs) typically have dependability and real-time requirements. Moreover, when they are deployed in dynamic environments, they must be flexible enough to adapt to changes in the operation requirements. The Fault Tolerance for Flexible Time-Triggered Ethernet (FT4FTT) project aims at providing a Switched-Ethernet architecture, based on the Flexible Time-Triggered communication paradigm (FTT), that is flexible and highly reliable. In particular, FT4FTT provides node fault-tolerance by means of active replication with majority voting. In this sense, FT4FTT includes the Consistent Replicated Voting (CRV) protocol to enforce replica determinism, even in presence of faults, while maximizing the reliability that can be achieved thanks to the node redundancy and the communication subsystem itself. This papers presents a first implementation of this protocol in a real prototype, and shows the on-going experimental evaluation been carried out to asses its correctness.