Self-adaptive deployment of services in mobile environments: a study of the communication reliability on the host election algorithm

Self-adaptive service deployment and replication are one of the possible approaches to address the changing computational conditions of mobile-based environments in order to ensure certain quality attributes of the system. The host election for the dynamic placement of service replicas is one of the main steps in the process to ensure the availability, reliability and performance in mobile distributed systems. The reliability of the host election algorithm is essential for the proper functioning of these systems. However, its distributed execution may be affected by the dynamic conditions of the mobile network. This paper presents an analysis of the reliability of an election algorithm on the basis of two different transmission protocols: TCP, a reliable protocol, and UDP, a non-reliable transmission protocol. The election algorithm is part of a self-adaptive architecture designed to address the availability of the services deployed in dynamic mobile network environments. © 2016, Springer International Publishing Switzerland.