On Feasibility of Adaptive Level Hardware Evolution for Emergent Fault Tolerant Communication

Abstract

A permanent physical fault in communication lines usually leads to a failure. The feasibility of evolution of a self organized communication is studied in this paper to defeat this problem. In this case a communication protocol may emerge between blocks and also can adapt itself to environmental changes like physical faults and defects. In spite of faults, blocks may continue to function since a self organized nature can provide self-healing capabilities. In the present paper, Evolvable Hardware is to create such a fault tolerant communication without any predefined protocol using a GA algorithm. Evolvable Hardware is a concept that aims the application of evolutionary algorithms to hardware design. The feasibility of this idea is studied in simulation of two reconfigurable blocks that are intended to transmit video streams through their communication lines. Permanent physical faults are induced in the communication lines between Evolvable Hardware blocks. Though the results show the emergence of fault tolerant protocols among Evolvable Hardware blocks without human intervention, there are some limitations in functional and gate level evolution of the blocks. Thus, a new adaptive approach is presented in this paper to defeat some limitations like the stalling effect of GA in faulty conditions.