Dependability Analysis of Homogeneous Distributed Software/Hardware Systems

Abstract

With the increasing demand for high availability in safety-critical systems such as banking systems, military systems, nuclear systems, aircraft systems to mention a few, reliability analysis of distributed software/hardware systems continue to be the focus of most researchers. The reliability analysis of a homogeneous distributed software/hardware system (HDSHS) with k-out-of-n : G configuration and no load-sharing nodes is analyzed. However, in practice the system load is shared among the working nodes in a distributed system. In this paper, the dependability analysis of a HDSHS with load-sharing nodes is presented. This distributed system has a load-sharing k-out-of-(n + m) : G configuration. A Markov model for HDSHS is developed. The failure time distribution of the hardware is represented by the accelerated failure time model. The software faults are detected during software testing and removed upon failure. The Jelinski–Moranda software reliability model is used. The maintenance personal can repair the system up on both software and hardware failure. The dependability measures such as reliability, availability and mean time to failure are obtained. The effect of load-sharing hosts on system hazard function and system reliability is presented. Furthermore, an availability comparison of our results and the results in the literature is presented.