Fault-Tolerant Distributed approach to satellite On-Board Computer design

In this paper, a novel design of a satellite Fault-Tolerant Distributed On-Board Computer (FTD-OBC) is proposed. The FTD-OBC fault-tolerance and task migration functions rely on a distributed coordination method, which is supported by an Adaptive Middleware for Fault-Tolerance (AMFT) block. The proposed distributed computer is adaptive and reconfigures itself in case of a failure seamlessly by migrating the tasks of a faulty node to other nodes. The FTD-OBC design is assessed against the popular centralized and Triple Modular redundant OBCs. The analysis demonstrates that the distributed OBC design achieves much higher reliability along with the inherent advantage of a higher computing performance. Experimental results are reported, which show that the proposed FTD-OBC is able to quickly migrate computing tasks when a fault occurs within a node, enabling seamless continuous operation.