Self-stabilizing embedded systems

The reliability of embedded systems is under constant pressure from miniaturization and cost savings. At some point miniaturized systems built into articles of daily use will show temporary hardware faults, induced for example by temperature changes, radiation of phones passing by, or simply mechanical stress. Thus, software can no longer safely assume that hardware offers fail-stop semantics. This paper shows how to build a self-stabilizing system that can recover from temporary hardware faults. Our approach is mainly carried out in software and requires only little hardware support. The goal is to deliver a low-cost system that can repair itself in constant time from a very wide range of faults.