An Experimental Facility for Cross-layer Adaptation of Service Oriented Distributed Systems

Ubiquitous and IoT (Internet of Things) systems consist of many parts, are highly distributed and need to be adaptive in a highly dynamic environment. The exploitation of adaptation possibilities at different layers needs to be coordinated to get an optimal result. However, it is difficult to test and evaluate such distributed systems with regard to their adaptive behaviour. This paper presents the design and implementation of a hybrid simulation based experimental facility for cross-layer adaptation of such adaptive systems. It is based on adaptation logic that builds runtime adaptation models based on information from the application, communication and hardware layers and uses the model for coordinated adaptation of these layers. The simulation facility has been implemented based on the MUSIC adaptation framework. Our work has been inspired by use cases from the subsea sensor networks and ambient assisted living domains, and the simulation facility is being applied to study the benefits of cross-layer adaptation in these domains. As preliminary validation of the proposed approach we discuss initial experience from the subsea sensor network use case. However, we believe that such simulation facility is generally applicable for application domains exhibiting highly distributed systems in heterogeneous and dynamically varying environments.