How are error handling and fault tolerance addressed in the EPD Pilot?

• A. Through checksums, retransmission, sequence tracking, fallbacks, and redundant paths to maintain operation during failures.
• B. Error handling is limited to logging.
• C. No fault tolerance mechanisms are used.
• D. Only timeouts are used to trigger a restart.

Answer: (C)

Error handling and fault tolerance in a protocol are usually about making sure the system can cope with errors without failing completely. In many designs, that means adding mechanisms like checksums to detect data corruption, retransmission to recover lost messages, sequence tracking to keep ordering, fallbacks to alternative paths, and redundant routes to stay available even if some parts fail.

The choice that says there are no fault tolerance mechanisms used reflects a design where the pilot itself is kept intentionally simple and does not perform internal error detection or automatic recovery. In this view, errors aren’t handled or corrected by the protocol, and any failure would have to be dealt with by an external layer or by restarting the process. This keeps the pilot lightweight and focused, but it places resilience responsibilities outside the protocol’s own logic. The other options describe common automatic recovery techniques that would add internal error handling, which is why they don’t fit the approach represented here.