COTS-Based Fault Tolerance in Deep Space: Qualitative and Quantitative Analyses of a Bus Network Architecture

Using COTS products, standards and intellectual properties (IPs) for all the system and component interfaces is a crucial step toward significant reduction of both system cost and development cost as the COTS interfaces enable other COTS products and IPs to be readily accommodated by the target system architecture. With respect to the long-term survivable systems for deep-space missions, the major challenge for us is, under stringent power and mass constraints, to achieve ultra-high reliability of the system comprising COTS products and standards that are not developed for mission-critical applications. The spirit of our solution is to exploit the pertinent standard features of a COTS product to circumvent its shortcomings, though these standard features may not be originally designed for highly reliable systems. In this paper, we discuss our experiences and findings on the design of an IEEE 1394 compliant fault-tolerant COTS-based bus architecture. We first derive and qualitatively analyze a -'stacktree topology" that not only complies with IEEE 1394 but also enables the implementation of a fault-tolerant bus architecture without node redundancy. We then present a quantitative evaluation that demonstrates significant reliability improvement from the COTS-based fault tolerance