A performance-based methodology to early evaluate the effectiveness of mobile software architectures

AbstractModern programming languages and hardware technologies require (and effectively enable) ever more software to be distributed. Different paradigms (client–server, mobility-based, etc.) can be adopted to design distributed software, and deciding the “best” paradigm is a typical choice to be made in the very early software design phases. Several factors should drive this choice, that can also change depending on the software application domain. Within this framework, we focus on a class of attributes related to the performance, and the contribution of this paper is twofold: we extend an existing architecture description language (ADL) to model the physical and logical mobility of components; we introduce a methodology that, starting from a software architecture described using this extended notation, generates a performance model (namely a Markov decision process (MDP)) that allows the designer to evaluate the convenience of introducing logical mobility into a software application. The insights gained by applying our methodology do not consist only in deciding whether a mobile paradigm is effective for the performance improvement of a given application, but also how to use the paradigm, that is where a component should move, based on a certain type of performance indices