Making sense of runtime architecture for mobile phone software

Abstract

ABSTRACT We present a metamodel for runtime architecture and demonstrate with experimental results how this metamodel can be used to recover, analyze and improve runtime architecture of mobile phone software. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.11 [ Software Architectures ]: Domain-specific architectures. D.4.1 [ Process Management ]: Scheduling. General Terms Measurement, Performance. Keywords Software architecture, performance, architecture recovery 1. INTRODUCTION Last year our research group was requested to study the runtime architecture of mobile phone software to understand whether some performance aspects of a phone could be improved. The size of mobile phone software is such that a study of detailed design would require significantly more time than could have been reasonably allocated for this project. Therefore we focused on the most essential design decisions that affect runtime operation of mobile phone software or, in other words, runtime software architecture. In this paper we give an overall account of this experience, which demonstrates that understanding runtime software architecture in terms of featuresets, concurrent tasks and resource scheduling framework makes it possible to recover essential architectural decisions from execution traces and analyze the effect of architectural decisions on software schedulability and performance. In the next section, we give a description of the application domain to motivate our selection of specific performance metrics and emphasize the special importance of runtime software architecture in this domain. We then explain our understanding of what constitutes runtime software architecture and define the metamodel we have used in this study. We follow with a description of experiments and architecture recovery techniques we used. Finally we analyze the findings and discuss how the recovered information about architecture can be used to recognize patterns for improvement.