Efficient improved ant colony optimisation algorithm for dynamic software rejuvenation in web services

Abstract

Software rejuvenation is an effective technique to counteract software ageing in continuously-running applications such as web-service-based systems. In a client-server application, where the server is intended to run perpetually, rejuvenation of the server process periodically during the server idle times increases the availability of that service. In these systems, web services are allocated based on the receiver's requirements and server's facilities. Since the selection of a server among candidates while maintaining the optimal quality of service is an NP-hard problem, meta-heuristics seems to be suitable. In this study, the proposed dynamic software rejuvenation as a proactive fault-tolerance technique based on a combination of ant colony optimisation (ACO) and gravitational emulation local search (GELS) so as to determine the optimal times when rejuvenation can be performed and failure rate can be minimised. The newly proposed method combined the public search capabilities of ACO with local search of GELS algorithm in an effort to create a stable algorithm, which can make reaching the global optimum largely possible in the proposed work. The simulation results revealed that the proposed strategy can decrease the failure rate of web services averagely by 28% in comparison with genetic algorithm and decision-tree strategies.