Towards Decentralized Management of Graceful Degradation in Distributed Embedded Systems

Graceful degradation entails a proportional loss of functionality or the reduction in the quality of services a system provides in response to faults. Compared to traditional techniques, graceful degradation is a promising approach to achieving fault tolerance at reduced cost. Current research using this approach in distributed embedded systems assumes a central management unit responsible for tracking resources and for system reconfiguration. Such units are single points of failure and maybe become costly when made fault tolerant by traditional techniques. This papers overviews current work on developing a framework that enables the specification and implementation of real-time distributed embedded systems that feature decentralized management