Modeling and availability analysis of nested software rejuvenation policy

Software rejuvenation is a proactive technique to counteract software aging. A new nested software rejuvenation policy is put forward in this paper. A finite-state automaton is used to model the working process of software with this policy. Comparing to the conventional periodic software rejuvenation policy, the nested policy takes into account the application-level and system-level rejuvenation simultaneously, specially giving emphasis on nesting. This paper solves the rejuvenation intervals based on the minimum downtime and compares the maximum system availability of the nested software rejuvenation policy with the conventional periodic software rejuvenation policy´s. The numerical results demonstrate that the new policy consumes less downtime, enhances software availability and reliability.