Performance Management in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

Todays spectrum of options in mobile cooperation over distance ranges from portable computers connected to infrastucture networks via the air interface up to communication and computation devices seamlessly and transparently integrated into cooperative work environments, so called ubiquitous computing environments. From a technical point of view, the success of such ubiquitous computing environments will depend on the quality of service (QoS) level at which they can be operated. The gap between the QoS demands of applications and services and the QoS that mobile and wireless networking technologies are able to deliver raises the need for QoS modelling and evaluation. In this paper, we argue that the traditional approach to performance analysis is no longer applicable in ubiquitous computing environments. The major reasons are the highly dynamic and changing QoS requirements, which require fast and proactive performance tuning activities and the interdependencies between user behaviour and system performance, which must be adequately covered in the workload modelling process. We argue for a paradigm shift towards performance management and will discuss the impacts on workload modelling and on performance analysis. Some initial results towards a performance management approach will be presented.