A UML Profile to Model Mobile Systems

The introduction of adaptation features in the design of applications that operate in a mobile computing environment has been suggested as a viable solution to cope with the high heterogeneity and variability of this environment. Mobile code paradigms can be used to this purpose, since they allow to dynamically modify the load of the hosting nodes and the internode traffic, to adapt to the resources available in the nodes and to the condition of the (often wireless) network link. In this paper we propose a UML profile to deal with all the relevant issues of a mobile system, concerning the mobility of both physical (e.g. computing nodes) and logical (e.g. software components) entities. The profile is defined as a lightweight customization of the UML 2.0 metamodel, so remaining fully compliant with it. In the definition of this profile, the underlying idea has been to model mobility (in both physical and logical sense) as a feature that can be “plugged” into a pre-existing architecture, to ease the modelling of both different physical mobility scenarios, and of different adaptation strategies based on code mobility. Besides defining the profile, we give some examples of use of its features.