A generic policy-free framework for fault-tolerant systems: Experiments on WSNs

Fault-tolerant systems are expected to run in a variety of devices ranging from standard PCs to embedded devices. In addition, the emergence of new software technologies has required these applications to meet the needs of heterogeneous software platforms. However, the existing approaches to build fault-tolerant systems are often targeted at a particular platform and software technology. The objective of this paper paper is to discuss the use of a generic component-based framework for the construction of adaptive fault tolerant systems that can integrate and re-use technologies and deploy them across heterogeneous devices. We have implemented a Java prototype of our framework and evaluated the potential benefits by means of development case-studies and performance measures. We show that we can overcome the problem of a wide degree of heterogeneity with minimal resource overheads by implementing and deploying these case studies in standard PCs as well as in sensor nodes.