Testbeds for Emulating Dependability Issues of Mobile Web Services

Today's ubiquitous internet access has opened new opportunities for mobile workers. By using portable devices, the workers are not only able to access their company's data and/or services from everywhere, but are also offering their own services for being accessible on-demand. The result is on the one hand a higher flexibility, in terms of coordination, but on the other hand poses various challenges to the company's internal workflows due to the dynamic nature of mobility. Consequently, the workflows must be tested at runtime in realistic scenarios in order to get evidence about their correct execution. In this paper we present an approach for emulating mobile workers in order to test the effects of unreliable dependability on workflows. By using the Genesis2 framework we generate testbeds consisting of real Web services and simulate their QoS as well as mobility issues such as packet loss, delay, and an unreliable availability. By generating a running testbed environment, our approach allows to investigate a workflow's execution at to detect runtime faults.