A Checkpointing Technique for Rollback Error Recovery in Embedded Systems

In this paper, a general checkpointing technique for rollback error recovery for embedded systems is proposed and evaluated. This technique is independent of used processor and employs the most important feature in control flow error detection mechanisms to simplify checkpoint selection and to minimize the overall code overhead. In this way, during the implementation of a control flow checking mechanism, the checkpoints are added to the program. To evaluate the checkpointing technique, a pre-processor is implemented that selects and adds the checkpoints to three workload programs running in an 8051 microcontroller-based system. The evaluation is based on 3000 experiments for each checkpoint.