A QoS and Security Adaptation Model for Autonomic Pervasive Systems

Mourad Alia, Marc Lacoste

Abstract

The unpredictable fluctuations in computing resources, contexts, and user preferences that characterize pervasive environments have stressed the need for context-aware self-adaptive systems. So far, this research area mostly dealt exclusively with concerns related either to standard QoS or to security. Taking into account trade-offs between these two conflicting concerns is a key issue, since they both compete for the same resources. This paper presents a general adaptivity model that reconciles these two concerns. This model is formalized as a component composition selection process, where the best composition is found by reasoning on security and non-security properties of the system. Utility functions are used to quantify how a component composition alternative is appropriate in a given context, with respect to the user preferences.