Autonomic Provisioning for Mobile Commerce

This paper presents an agile solution to the problems of maintaining availability in e-commerce, given the unpredictability and rapidly changing circumstances that can occur in mobile settings. A major concern is resilience to ensure an adaquate provision of resources and to provide effective load balancing techniques, which must occur in an autonomic manner. It is clear that the scale and complexity of these systems makes centralized individual assignment of jobs to specific e-commerce servers infeasible; leading to the need for an effective distributed solution. This paper investigates firstly the autonomic handling of flash crowds, predominantly occurring in mobile domains, and secondly three possible distributed solutions for load balancing: Flash crowds are monitored for at the edges of the domain, with appropriate responses provided by situation-prediction-action type constructs. The subsequent load balancing and job allocation is assessed over three distributed solutions: An approach inspired by the foraging behaviour of the Honeybee, Biased Random Sampling and Active Clustering. Together these techniques provide a high level of assurance for the mobile e-commerce functions availability to ensure adherence to customer Service Level Agreements.