A UML Profile for Software Architectures and Peer to Peer Dependable Applications

Peer-to-peer (p2p) applications exhibit characteristics such as dynamic network topology and configuration, heterogeneity and scalability that make their development a complicated task. This is further aggravated due to the required satisfaction of dependability properties, i.e. security, availability, reliability, etc. Furthermore, p2p application requirements are driven by the software architecture adopted for their development while in other kinds of applications, the requirements drive the architecture. It is therefore only natural to adopt an architecture-based approach for the development of p2p dependable applications in order to ensure at the architectural level that dependability requirements are met. An essential part for the effective architecture-based development is the use of an appropriate modelling mechanism. In this paper we argue on the use of a UML profile that provides appropriate constructs and notations for modelling dependable p2p software architectures.