Estimating Model Parameters of Adaptive Software Systems in Real-Time

Adaptive software systems have the ability to adapt to changes in workload and execution environment. In order to perform resource management through model based control in such systems, an accurate mechanism for estimating the software system’s model parameters is required. This paper deals with real-time estimation of a performance model for adaptive software systems that process multiple classes of transactional workload. First, insights in to the static performance model estimation problem are provided. Then an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) design is combined with an open queueing network model to dynamically estimate the model parameters in real-time. Specific problems that are encountered in the case of multiple classes of workload are analyzed. These problems arise mainly due to the under-deterministic nature of the estimation problem. This motivates us to propose a modified design of the filter. Insights for choosing tuning parameters of the modified design, i.e., number of constraints and sampling intervals are provided. The modified filter design is shown to effectively tackle problems with multiple classes of workload through experiments.