Analysing Internet software retrieval systems: Modeling and performance comparison

Nowadays, there exist web sites that allow users to retrieve and install software in an easy way. The performance of these sites may be poor if they are used in wireless networks; the reason is the inadequate use of the net resources that they need. If these kinds of systems are designed using mobile agent technology the previous problem might be avoided. In this paper, we present a comparison between the performance of a software retrieval system especially designed to be used in a wireless network and the performance of a software retrieval system similar to the well-known Tucows.com web site. In order to compare performance, we make use of a software performance process enriched with formal techniques. The process has as important features that it uses UML as a design notation and it uses stochastic Petri nets as formal model. Petri nets provide a formal semantics for the system and a performance model.