Behavioral Analysis of a Fault-Tolerant Software System with Rejuvenation

Koichiro RINSAKA  Tadashi DOHI 

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Information and Systems  Vol.E88-D  No.12  pp.2681-2690
Publication Date: 2005/12/01
Online ISSN: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8532
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (IEICE/IEEE Joint Special Section on Autonomous Decentralized Systems)
Category: 
Keyword: 
software fault tolerance,  rejuvenation,  software aging,  bivariate failure mode,  continuous-time Markov chain, 

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Summary: 
In recent years, considerable attention has been devoted to continuously running software systems whose performance characteristics are smoothly degrading in time. Software aging often affects the performance of a software system and eventually causes it to fail. A novel approach to handle transient software failures due to software aging is called software rejuvenation, which can be regarded as a preventive and proactive solution that is particularly useful for counteracting the aging phenomenon. In this paper, we focus on a high assurance software system with fault-tolerance and preventive rejuvenation, and analyze the stochastic behavior of such a highly critical software system. More precisely, we consider a fault-tolerant software system with two-version redundant structure and random rejuvenation schedule, and evaluate quantitatively some dependability measures like the steady-state system availability and MTTF based on the familiar Markovian analysis. In numerical examples, we examine the dependence of two fault tolerant techniques; design and environment diversity techniques, on the system dependability measures.