Adaptation of mobile and distributed systems

The usage of mobile computing devices such as smartphones is increasing significantly in society. Software exists in these devices, e.g., mobile applications, but it is mostly transparent as mobile applications can use pervasive services, as the ones offered by the cloud, or stop using them without users being aware. However, software becomes apparent when failures occur. The research in mobile software engineering is a green area with interest in both academia and industry whose objective is to assure the development of secure, high-quality applications on mobile devices.

As mobile applications evolve and become more business critical it is essential to apply software engineering processes and techniques to assure their quality. Mobile applications continuously interact with devices, networks, their environments, or pervasive services. Mobile or pervasive systems continuously change their environments and resources (e.g. battery or bandwidth). Mobile applications require different services when they enter or exit environments and as their resources change. This project suggests a radical reconceptualisation of mobile software engineering by using an architecture centric approach at runtime.

This work has been partly funded by the University of Brighton Rising Star Scheme awarded to Dr Nour Ali.

Project aims

The project aims to develop a model based software architectural runtime approach for supporting mobile systems to self-adapt to resources when they enter or exit environments.

Mobile architecture at runtime diagram

Components for discovering mobile architectures at runtime

Project findings and impact

We propose a service oriented architectural approach that supports self-adaptation to changes in resources and location topology when mobility occurs, by reconfiguring the software architecture at runtime. The location topology and mobility primitives are inspired from ambient calculus. Our approach considers ambients to be autonomic elements that can manage elements located in them to their environment and provide them with new services suited to the available resources, when mobility occurs. Self-adaptation occurs by using the software architectural topology at runtime, which is used as a knowledge base, and by selecting a service oriented architectural configuration that best suits the resources when mobility occurs.

Our approach also monitors the running mobile system adaptable sources such as devices, environments, the services, or the mobile behaviour, and allowing developers, software architects or system administrators to be cognisant (visualise and observe) of runtime information in an explicit architectural model. This will allow users to monitor the adaptation of the mobile system by discovering their architectural models at runtime and representing them graphically.

Research team

Dr Noor Ali

Carlos Solis

Output

Partners