Empirical Evaluation of Dynamic Local Adaptation for Distributed Mobile Applications

Distributed mobile applications operate on devices with diverse capabilities, in heterogeneous environments, where parameters such as processor, memory and network utilisation, are constantly changing. In order to maintain efficiency in terms of performance and resource utilisation, such applications should be able to adapt to their environment. Therefore, this paper proposes and empirically evaluates a local adaptation strategy for mobile applications, with ‘local’ referring to a strategy that operates independently on each node in the distributed application. The strategy is based upon a series of formal adaptation models and a suite of mobile application metrics introduced by the authors in a recent paper. The experiments demonstrate the potential practical application of the local adaptation strategy using a number of distinct scenarios involving runtime changes in processor, memory and network utilisation. In order to maintain application efficiency in response to these changing operating conditions, the system reacts by rearranging the object topology of the application by dynamically moving objects between nodes.