Design and performance modeling of component interconnection patterns for distributed software architectures

Abstract

The ability to estimate the future performance of a large and complex distributed software system at design time, and iteratively refine these estimates at development time, can significantly reduce overall software cost and risk. This paper investigates component interconnection in client/server systems, in particular the design and performance modeling of component interconnection patterns, which define and encapsulate the way client and server components communicate with each other. We start with UML design models of the component interconnection patterns. These designs are performance annotated using an XML-type notation. The performance-annotated UML design model is mapped to a performance model, which allows us to analyze the performance of the software architecture executing on various system configurations.