Adaptive resource and service management in a mobile-enabled environment

Due to its nature, a mobile-enabled environment is very dynamic: reachable resources and services change very often. Users hardly know which resources they can exploit and which services they may require. In such a context, a technical support which identifies the available resources and services and indicates which resource is the best one to execute a service would be very helpful. This chapter proposes an adaptive solution to achieve these issues. Adaptivity is related to the fact that besides searching for the reachable resources or services, this approach proposes the most appropriate one for the current request by exploiting additional information about users, resources and services. Moreover, it ensures that services are delivered with the qualities requested and expected by the users. In the scientific literature adaptivity is exploited for functionality reasons (i.e., a system is not able to do what it was supposed to do) or for performance reasons (i.e., a system is not able to ensure the qualities of the services expected by the users or there is a better configuration for a given task). A challenging issue of adaptivity is the identification and design of the knowledge useful for the adaptation process and how this knowledge is exploited at run-time especially in a highly dynamic environment. This chapter proposes an approach which models the adaptation knowledge through reflective entities, qualities and properties, the management of the adaptation knowledge through views, the decision support through strategies, and the management of the functional and non-functional elements through managers. © 2009, IGI Global.