EVALUATING THE IMPACT OF SOFTWARE-BASED ECC MEMORY PROTECTION ON THE PERFORMANCE OF UAV ONBOARD SOFTWARE

This paper evaluates the impact of software-based ECC protection of volatile memory on the performance of onboard software for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The proposed approach computes and verifies check bits at the level of software containers for critical data structures using a SECDED-class code (single-bit error correction and double-bit error detection). The experimental evaluation is carried out using microbenchmarks that reproduce memory-access patterns typical for onboard systems: periodic updates of a small state (read–modify–write), streaming operations over telemetry/sensor buffers, random reads from tables, and a mixed workload. Measurements are performed in a release build with warm-up for representative working-set sizes (state: 2 KiB, buffer: 8 MiB, table: 8 MiB). The results show that the memory overhead of software ECC is stable and predictable at approximately 12.5% (1 byte of check data per 8 bytes of payload). At the same time, the time overhead depends on the access pattern and is substantial in the current implementation. Specifically, the measured slowdown factors are approximately 180 times for small-state updates, 654 times for the streaming mode, 26 times for random reads, and 73 times for the mixed workload. These findings indicate that applying software ECC to large streaming buffers without additional optimization may be impractical for real-time systems, whereas selective protection of the most critical structures is more feasible in practice.