Assessing the reliability impacts of software fault-tolerance mechanisms

  • Authors:
  • V. B. Mendiratta

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • ISSRE '96 Proceedings of the The Seventh International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1996

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Abstract

Telecommunications systems are characterized by highly stringent reliability requirements for system availability and defect rate. A combination of approaches is used to achieve high software reliability, namely, fault avoidance, fault removal and implementation of fault-tolerant mechanisms. This paper focuses on the implementation of software fault-tolerant mechanisms and analyzes the impact of these mechanisms on software reliability. Based on field data on the frequency of invocation of some fault-tolerant mechanisms, we present an escalating recovery model for predicting the impact of these mechanisms on lost calls. The key parameters of the model are: the software fault recovery coverage factor; the proportion of successful recoveries at each level and the calls lost at each recovery level. The output of the model is a distribution and average of the number of lost calls per software error. The applicability of this model to systems with high reliability has been validated; the applicability of the model to less reliable systems is an area for future work.