Analysis of effective service time with age dependent interruptions and its application to optimal rollback policy for database management

A stochastic model is developed describing a service system subject to inhomogeneous Poisson interruptions with age dependent interruption periods. By studying the probabilistic flow of the underlying multivariate Markov process, the Laplace transform of the effective service time is explicitly obtained. For general renewal interruptions, only the expected effective service time is derived. As an application, an optimal checkpoint policy is examined for database management. It is shown that an optimal policy maximizing the ergodic availability of the database is to implement a checkpoint as soon as the cumulative uptime of the database reaches a prespecified constant k^*. A computational procedure is then developed for finding k^* and numerical results are exhibited.