A proactive approach for context-aware self-adaptive mobile applications to ensure Quality of Service

Mobile Applications are rapidly emerging as a convenient medium for using a variety of services. With the high penetration of smart phones in society, self-adaptation has become an essential capability required by mobile application users. In an ideal scenario, an application is required to adjust its behavior according to the current context of its use. This raises the challenge in mobile computing towards the design and development of applications that sense and react to contextual changes to provide a value-added user experience. In its general sense, context information can relate to the environment, the user, or the device status. In this paper, a framework is proposed for building context aware and adaptive mobile applications. Based on the concepts of software requirement specification and probabilistic modeling, this framework guides the modeling of adaptability at design time and supports context awareness and adaptability at runtime to tackle potential issues that can hamper Quality of Service (QoS). In the core of the approach, a probabilistic model has been derived from the software requirement model using the quantitative terms of context dependability and then, it is continuously verified against the runtime operations of a mobile application. Finally, the proposed approach has been used in a mobile application development use case to observe how proactive adaptability can be built into mobile application development to ensure QoS.