A group membership protocol for communication systems with both static and dynamic scheduling

Abstract

We present a group membership protocol specially designed for next generation communication systems for real-time safety-critical applications such as FlexRay and FTT-CAN. The proposed protocol imposes an overhead of two bits per processor per communication cycle, when the system is in a quiescent state, and is able to tolerate benign failures of up to half of the group members between consecutive executions. Additionally, it removes a faulty processor within two communication cycles in the worst case and reintegrates a processor at the latest two communication cycles after it recovers. Compared with protocols developed for similar systems, it is as tolerant as the most robust protocol with a traffic overhead slightly higher than the most efficient protocol, which is much less robust. © 2006 IEEE.