Fault tolerance with aspects: a feasibility study

Abstract

To enable correct program execution on unreliable hardware, software can be made fault-tolerant by adding program statements or machine instructions for fault detection and recovery. Manually modifying programs does not scale, and extending compilers to emit additional machine instructions lacks flexibility. However, since software-implemented hardware fault tolerance (SIHFT) can be understood as a cross-cutting concern, we propose aspect-oriented programming as a suitable implementation technique. We prove this proposition by implementing an AN encoder based on AspectC++. In terms of performance and fault coverage, we achieve comparable results to existing compiler-based solutions.