Anti-aging analysis for software reliability design modes in the context of single-event effect

Software aging is a risk associated with the continuous operation of software, and it is essential and meaningful to develop anti-aging technology to offset or mitigate the aging phenomenon. While considerable attention has been devoted to software aging and anti-aging techniques, few studies have focused on single-event effect as a software-aging reason in the context of a space environment. In this study, aiming at the software-aging problem caused by the specific reason above, besides the classic software rejuvenation, we further explore the anti-aging effects and rules of software reliability design modes, including triple modular redundancy (TMR) and logical partitioning. Reliability and availability are used as aging indicators, and the anti-aging effect of reliability design modes and rejuvenation policy is quantitatively analyzed through probabilistic model checking. The simulation and theoretical results show that the reliability design mode can alleviate software aging. However, the TMR mode is time-sensitive. It is found that the application of the rejuvenation policy makes time-sensitivity disappear. A combination of reliability design modes and rejuvenation policy can obtain the best anti-aging effect. The analysis and discussion in this paper can provide useful insights for software researchers to instantiate different software anti-aging inventions or new applications.