A User-Centric Approach for Improving a Distributed Software System’s Deployment Architecture

The quality of service (QoS) provided by a distributed software system depends on many system parameters, such as network bandwidth, reliability of links, frequencies of software component interactions, etc. A distributed system's deployment architecture can have a significant impact on its QoS. Furthermore, the deployment architecture will influence user satisfaction, as users typically have varying QoS preferences for the system services they access. Finding a deployment architecture that will maximize the users' overall satisfaction is a challenging, multi-faceted problem. In this paper, we present a framework model and a set of generic algorithms that can be tailored and instantiated to address this problem. We also provide an evaluation of our approach by applying it on a large number of representative scenarios. 1