Software micro-rejuvenation for Android mobile systems

Software aging – the phenomenon affecting many long-running systems, causing perfor-mance degradation or an increasing failure rate over mission time, and eventually leadingto failure - is known to affect mobile devices and their operating systems, too. Softwarerejuvenation – the technique typically used to counteract aging – may compromise theuser’s perception of availability and reliability of the personal device, if applied at acoarse grain, e.g., by restarting applications or, worse, rebooting the entire device.This article proposes a configurable micro-rejuvenation technique to counteract soft-ware aging in Android-based mobile devices, acting at a fine-grained level, namely onin-memory system data structures. The technique is engineered in two phases. Beforereleasing the (customized) Android version, a heap profiling facility is used by the manu-facturer’s developers to identify potentially bloating data structures in Android servicesand to instrument their code. After release, an aging detection and rejuvenation servicewill safely clean up the bloating data structures, with a negligible impact on user per-ception and device availability, as neither the device nor operating system’s processesare restarted. The results of experiments show the ability of the technique to providesignificant gains in aging mobile operating system responsiveness and time to failure.