Title
Towards Affordable Fault-Tolerant Nanosatellite Computing with Commodity Hardware
Abstract
Modern embedded and mobile-market processor technology is a cornerstone of miniaturized satellite design. This type of lighter, cheaper, and rapidly developed spacecraft has enabled a variety of new commercial and scientific missions. However micro-and nanosatellites (<100kg) currently are not considered suitable for critical, high-priority, and complex multi-phased missions, due to their low reliability. The hardware fault tolerance (FT) concepts used aboard larger spacecraft can usually not be used, due to tight energy and mass constraints, as well as disproportional costs. Thus, we developed a hardware-software hybrid FT-approach, which enables FT through software-side coarse-grain lockstep, FPGA reconfiguration, and thread-level mixed criticality. This allows our FPGA-based proof-of-concept implementation to deliver strong fault coverage even for missions with a long duration, but also to adapt to varying performance requirements during the mission. In this paper, we present the implementation results on a tiled multiprocessor system-on-a-chip (MPSoC) design we developed as an ideal platform for our approach. We provide details on the validation of our approach through fault injection, which show that our lockstep implementation is effective and efficient for providing FDIR within our system, and show in direct comparison that our results are consistent with related work. These results show that our architecture is effective, overhead efficient, and remains within the tight energy, complexity, and cost limitations of even very small spacecraft such as CubeSats. To our knowledge, this is the first fault mitigation approach offering strong fault tolerance, which can uphold computational correctness viable for miniaturized spacecraft and is not dependent on proprietary processor cores.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/ATS.2018.00034
2018 IEEE 27th Asian Test Symposium (ATS)
Keywords
Field
DocType
fault tolerance, miniaturized satellite, MPSoC, System on Chip, Tiles, Compartment, Fault injection, fault coverage, lock step, coarse grain lock step, software side FT, mixed criticality, radiation, partial reconfiguration, FPGA, ARM Cortex A53, Microblaze, COTS, cubesat, nanosatellite, RHBD, radiation hardening by design
Fault coverage,Computer science,Lockstep,Mixed criticality,Real-time computing,Fault tolerance,MPSoC,Multi-core processor,Control reconfiguration,Fault injection,Embedded system
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1081-7735
978-1-5386-9467-1
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.37
8
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christian M. Fuchs111.72
Nadia M. Murillo211.05
Aske Plaat352472.18
Erik van der Kouwe4589.55
Peng Wang5385106.03