Self-managing and self-organising mobile computing applications: a separation of concerns approach

Although the research area of self-organising systems is well established, their construction is often ad hoc. Consequently, such software is difficult reuse across applications that require similar functionality of have similar goals. The development of self-organising applications and, a fortiori, self-organising mobile applications is therefore limited to developers who are experts in specific self-organising mechanisms. As a first step towards addressing this, this paper discusses the notion of self-organising mechanisms provided as services for building higher level functionality in a modular way. This eases reuse and thus provides separation of concerns. Additionally, because of the dynamic and heterogeneous nature of mobile networks, services need to adapt themselves in order to ensure both functional and non-functional requirements. This paper discusses whether the self-management of self-organising mobile applications can be achieved in a modular fashion, via the self-management of low level self-organising services it employs, rather than considering the management of the complex system as a whole. We empirically investigate two non-functional aspects: resource optimisation and accuracy.