A systematic review of fault tolerance techniques for smart city applications

Abstract

Smart City Applications encompass many characteristics that increase the risk of failures, such as context-awareness, adaptiveness, distribution and heterogeneity. Therefore, it is important to implement fault-tolerant mechanisms to produce more reliable applications. This study presents a systematic literature review of fault tolerance techniques that have been proposed for, or applied to Smart City Applications. It also characterizes faults, errors and failures that may occur in these systems. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first review that provides a broad picture of the research area and points out research limitations and directions. We selected 43 primary studies and performed initial classifications (e.g., based on type of research, type of contribution, application domains and subdomains, and type of system architecture). We further classified and discussed the selected studies based on types of fault tolerance techniques and types of faults and failures. System Reconfiguration, Diversity, and Retry are classical techniques that have been investigated in this domain. Many fault and failure types have also been addressed. While those well-known techniques have been explored for introducing fault tolerance capabilities into Smart City Applications, others have been overlooked. Moreover, evidence on the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed fault tolerance solutions is still very limited.

Editor’s note: Open Science material was validated by the Journal of Systems and Software Open Science Board.