Customizing dependability attributes for mobile service platforms

Mobile service platforms are used to facilitate access to enterprise services such as email, product inventory, or design drawing databases by a wide range of mobile devices using a variety of access protocols. This paper presents a quality of service (QoS) architecture that allows flexible combinations of dependability attributes such as reliability, timeliness, and security to be enforced on a per service request basis. In addition to components that implement the underlying dependability techniques, the architecture includes policy components that evaluate a request's requirements and dynamically determine an appropriate execution strategy. The architecture has been integrated into an experimental version of iMobile, a mobile service platform being developed at AT&T. This paper describes the design and implementation of the architecture, and gives initial experimental results for the iMobile prototype.