A framework to support adaptation decisions for dynamic distributed systems

The increasing presence of mobile and ubiquitous applications has created a need for distributed systems and applications that are dynamic and can efficiently adapt to changes in quality of service (QoS), resource availability, user requirements and location of mobile nodes. This is done by dynamically reconfiguring system components. Reconfiguration should be done with minimal effect on system performance. A crucial issue is to determine what types of changes and how much change characterizes the need for reconfiguration, and what is the cost (in terms of resource usage) incurred on the system. We propose a reconfiguration framework based on policies and illustrate our initial prototype.