A Component-Based Approach to Reliability Analysis of Distributed Systems

  • Authors:

  • Sherif M. Yacoub;Bojan Cukic;Hany H. Ammar

  • Affiliations:

  • -;-;-

  • Venue:
  • SRDS '99 Proceedings of the 18th IEEE Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

There is an increasing demand on using off-the-shelf (OTS) software components to facilitate the development of software systems. Distributed software systems are often too complex to develop from scratch. Therefore, distributed system designers are motivated to deploy trusted software components resulting in a component-based nature of the system. Using OTS components could indicate a more reliable software. However, the sensitivity of the system reliability to component reliabilities needs further investigation based on reliability analysis models and techniques that are suitable for distributed component-based software. The distributed nature of these systems further coerces the analysis technique to incorporate link and delivery channel reliabilities.This paper proposes a reliability analysis technique for distributed software systems. The technique is based on scenarios that are modeled as sequence diagrams. Using scenarios, we construct Component-Dependency Graphs (CDG). CDGs have been introduced for reliability analysis of component-based systems. They are extended here to serve the complex nature of distributed systems by applying nesting and hierarchy. CDGs include component and link reliabilities, which are treated as first class elements of the model. Based on CDGs, we present an algorithm to analyze the sensitivity of system reliability to reliabilities of its components, subsystems, and links. The proposed analysis technique is useful in identifying critical components and critical component links. An example based on medical informatics standard is presented to illustrate our methodology.