Fault-Prevention in Smart Environments for Dependable Applications

The functionality and the performance of smart environment applications can be hampered by faults. Fault tolerance solutions aim to achieve graceful performance degradation in the presence of faults, ideally without leading to application failures. This is a reactive approach and, by itself, gives little flexibility and time for preventing potential failures. We propose a proactive fault-prevention framework, which predicts potential low-level hardware, software and network faults and tries to prevent them via dynamic adaptation. We envision that the proposed framework will provide better control over performance degradation of smart environment applications, increased reliability and availability, and a reduced number of manual user interventions.