Embedded systems, already ubiquitous, are becoming more and more part of everyday life. The complexity of modern embedded software poses formidable challenges to system reliability. The increasing use of software for implementing the functionality, has led to increasing demands for more sophisticated Embedded Software Maintenance. Preventive maintenance is applied to improve the device availability. In operational software system, their values depend on the software system structure as well as on the software component availability and reliability. These values decrease as the software age increases. With reactive maintenance becoming more and more complex and expensive, software developers are seeking more proactive approaches to maintenance. Virtualization has recently become important technology for embedded systems. In this paper, we study the virtualization technology and proactive software rejuvenation methodology to counteract the operational embedded software system aging problem. We also present the conditional based preventive maintenance model and derive the closed-form expressions of operational embedded software system availability through a Markov Process. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the applicability of the model.

availability, embedded software system, modeling, software rejuvenation, virtualization