Software rejuvenation impacts on a phased-mission system for Mars exploration

When software contains aging-related faults and the system has a long mission period, phased-mission systems consisting of several software components can suffer from software aging, which is a progressive degradation of the software execution environment. Failures caused by software aging might impact on the mission success probability. In this paper, we present a model for a phased-mission system with software rejuvenation, and analyze the impacts of software rejuvenation on the success probability and completion time distribution of the mission. The mission of Mars exploration rover is considered as an example of phased-mission system. The analysis results show that the mission success probability is improved by software rejuvenation at the cost of the mission completion time.