Analysis of service availability for time-triggered rejuvenation policies

In this paper we investigate the effect of three time-triggered system rejuvenation policies on service availability using a queuing model. The model is formulated as an extended stochastic Petri net using a variety of distributions for times between state changes. We define a metric for steady-state service availability and derive how it can be estimated from the models. We further analyze time-to-failure of systems with rejuvenation. Experiments show that the optimal rejuvenation interval as well as the achievable service availability improvement depend significantly on system utilization. The experiments also show that service availability can deviate significantly from steady-state system availability. Furthermore, we find that two of the three policies perform equally well so that the most appropriate can be chosen according to its applicability to a system in practice.