An Out-band Hardware Monitoring System With High Dependability And Wireless Transmission Mode

With the wide application of computer systems in key areas, such as aerospace,meteorology, disaster relief, military, the reliability and dependability of computer systems tend to be more and more important. Once failure occurs to hardware systems,they may cause enormous economic losses,and even affect personal safety and national security. Meanwhile, system failure occurs frequently because of the varieties of the modern computers deployment environments. In order to ensure the monitor function is running properly when system serious failure occur or even power is cut off, the hardware out-band monitoring should be adopted. In addition, many computer systems may be deployed in uninhabited and harsh environment such as deep space,desert, waters and freeze zones. Traditional cable monitoring systems for computer will be difficult to deploy, so that it is imperative to apply the wireless transmission mode to computer monitoring systems. Throughout a general survey of existing systems out-band hardware monitoring method, common problems like single monitoring method, low automation extent, poor security are pervasive. Especially,the malicious intrusion and disruption will greatly reduce the whole monitoring system's dependability,which has not been considered in most existing computer monitoring systems.Accordingly, an out-band hardware' monitoring system with wireless transmission mode and high dependability is proposed. First of all, by a consideration about the requirements of wireless transmission, high dependability and out-band monitoring, a computer hardware monitoring system model consisting of detection layer, network layer and application layer is constructed. Secondly, on the use of IEEE 802.15.4 protocol carrying Zigbee communication, the wireless transmission mode of monitoring system is achieved. Next, considering the balance between the limitation of hardware monitoring system's resources and the dependability,an identity authentication and data integrity protection protocol are proposed,whose protocol's hardware implementation efficiency is high,and can accomplish identity authentication and data integrity protection, thus avoiding the intrusion from personating nodes and malicious behaviors. At last, computer hardware monitoring system above-mentioned is designed in details and implemented, and function verification and performance analysis of all the system functions are accomplished.This study can be applied to computers which run in harsh or large scale computing cluster environment, and enhancing the dependability of the monitoring system.