On Hardware Resource Consumption for Aspect-Oriented Implementation of Fault Tolerance

Software-implemented fault tolerance is a widely used technique for achieving high dependability in cost-sensitive applications. One approach to implementing fault tolerance in software is to use aspect-oriented programming (AOP). This paper investigates the hardware overhead imposed by software mechanisms for time-redundant execution and control flow checking implemented by using AOP. The impacts on static and dynamic memory consumption as well as execution time are measured. The overheads caused by using AOP were shown to be an issue. However, two optimizations to the weaver that reduce the overhead caused by the AOP language weaver were identified. Using these optimizations the overhead was reduced to acceptable or even beneficial levels compared to using standard C.