Performance Modeling and Analysis of Context-Aware Mobile Software Systems

Context-awareness is becoming a first class attribute of software systems. In fact, applications for mobile devices need to be aware of their context in order to adapt their structure and behavior and offer the best quality of service even in case the (software and hardware) resources are limited. Although performance is a key non-functional property for such applications, existing approaches for performance modeling and analysis fail to capture the characteristics related to the context, thus resulting not suited for this domain. In this paper we introduce a framework for modeling and analyzing the performance of context-aware mobile software systems. The framework allows to model: the software architecture, the context management, the adaptable behaviors and the performance parameters. Such models can then be transformed into performance models for analysis purposes. We tailor an integrated environment for modeling these elements in UML, and we show how to use it for performance analysis purposes. The modeling environment description and the performance analysis are driven by an example in the eHealth domain.