Lifetime Extension of Software Execution Subject to Aging

Software aging is a phenomenon of progressive degradation of software execution environment caused by software faults. In this paper, we propose software life-extension as an operational countermeasure against software aging and present the mathematical foundations of software life-extension by mean...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inIEEE transactions on reliability Vol. 66; no. 1; pp. 123 - 134
Main Authors Machida, Fumio, Jianwen Xiang, Tadano, Kumiko, Maeno, Yoshiharu
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published IEEE 01.03.2017
Subjects
Aging
Availability
Computer bugs
Degradation
job completion time
software aging
software life-extension
software rejuvenation
Software systems
Steady-state
Switched-mode power supply
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Summary:Software aging is a phenomenon of progressive degradation of software execution environment caused by software faults. In this paper, we propose software life-extension as an operational countermeasure against software aging and present the mathematical foundations of software life-extension by means of stochastic modeling. A semi-Markov process is used to capture the behavior of a system with software life-extension and to analyze the system's availability and completion times of jobs running on it. The semi-Markov process can correctly model the time-based life-extension and allows us to derive the optimal trigger for starting life-extension in terms of system availability and mean job completion time. We also present an effective combination of software life-extension and software rejuvenation that can maximize the system availability compared with a system using either rejuvenation or software life-extension.
ISSN:0018-9529
1558-1721
DOI:10.1109/TR.2016.2615880