Increasing Software Reliability through Rollback and On-line Fault Repair

In this paper, we propose a new paradigm for increasing the reliability of a software system by combining reactive and proactive approaches. The proposed approach employs rollback and restart for masking transient failures, and employs on-line software version change to remove faults from the software. A model for reliability analysis of a system employing the proposed approach is presented. The analysis shows that substantial benefit in reliability can be obtained by employing the proposed approach. A prototype system which incorporates the proposed approach is also described.