Ensuring Component Application Consistency on Small Devices: A Repository-Based Approach

Deployment of component-based applications may involve complex issues of maintaining their consistency, both when composing a complete application and updating a small subset of its components. Evaluating consistency may be a computationally-intensive problem, especially if it involves behavioural compatibility or extra-functional property assessment. This poses serious challenge to its application on resource-constrained devices which represent an important future computing platform. This work describes an approach that aims to address this challenge by separating the tasks of obtaining the results of component consistency evaluation and using them in deployment and update processes. The first task is in our approach performed by a repository with sufficient computational resources. The results are transformed into rich, remotely accessible meta-data which are easily checked by the component frameworks and application management agents on the devices. Experiences with a prototype implementation called CRCE as well as initial measurements suggest that the approach can make application consistency evaluation feasible in resource-constrained scenarios.