Heartbeat count estimation in safety critical systems

Heartbeats are signals periodically generated from remote sensors attached to a system whose status needs to be continuously monitored for safety. If consecutive n heartbeats are not transferred to a monitoring site, the target system is considered abnormal and might be shut down as in the case of monitoring nuclear power plants. In this paper, we propose a method to estimate the heartbeat count in the safety critical systems. Given a user-defined safety bound, the proposed method estimates the count n which satisfies the safety bound.