ABSTRACT
The Braided-Ring Availability Integrity Network (BRAIN) can use almost any existing local area network (LAN) technology to implement its communication links, including any of the IEEE 802.3 Ethernet variants. The BRAIN uses the least amount of hardware to achieve single fault tolerance (including Byzantine failure) of any known data network. The BRAIN also can tolerate two benign faults with no additional redundancy. The BRAIN topology enables adjacent nodes to collaboratively form self-checking pairs (SCPs). The BRAIN's first propagation mode focuses on in-line integrity failure detection, that is, the possible corruption of data during a node's data relaying action and availability in the event of a single fault. The BRAIN's second propagation mode focuses on tolerating a second benign (fail-stop or omission) failure. The BRAIN is able to tolerate a benign second fault without any increase in redundancy. The accuracy and validity of the BRAIN's leader-elect master/slave synchronization approach is dependent on the fault coverage of the master clocks.
