REACT: A Model-Based Runtime Environment for Adapting Communication Systems

Trends such as the Internet of Things or edge computing lead to a growing number of networked devices. Hence, it is becoming increasingly important to manage communication systems at runtime. Adding self-adaptive capabilities is one approach to reduce administrative effort and cope with changing execution contexts. Existing frameworks for building self-adaptive software can help to reduce development effort in general. Yet, they are neither tailored towards the use in communication systems nor easily usable without profound knowledge in self-adaptive systems development. In this paper, we propose REACT, a reusable, model-based runtime environment to complement communication systems with adaptive behavior. It addresses the heterogeneity and distribution aspects of networks and reduces development effort. REACT empowers developers of communication systems to add adaptive behavior without having experience in self-adaptive systems development. We show the effectiveness and efficiency of our prototype in an experimental evaluation based on two distinct use cases from the communication systems domain: cloud resource management and software-defined networking. The first use case includes a comparison with Rainbow, which represents a state-of-the-art model-based framework for building self-adaptive systems. The second use case applies REACT in a sophisticated, real-world communication system scenario.