Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades RTI2018-094591-B-I00Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades RTI2018-101204-B-C21 (HORATIO)Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad BELI (TIN2015-70560-R)TIN2016-81978-REDTJunta de Extremadura GR18112Junta de Andalucía APOLO (US-1264651)Junta de Extremadura IB1803

Berrocal, Javier

Fernández Montes, Pablo

Laso, Sergio

Murillo, Juan M.

Ruiz Cortés, Antonio

English

idUS. Depósito de Investigación Universidad de Sevilla

∗University of Extremadura, Cáceres, SpainEmail:{slasom, jberolm, juanmamu}@unex.es†I3US Institute, SCORE Lab. Universidad de Sevilla, Sevilla, SpainEmail:{pablofm, aruiz}@us.esI. INTRODUCTIONThis artifact is a guideline for the use of Perses. Persesis a framework for evaluating the Quality of Service (QoS)of distributed mobile applications. Perses allows developersto define and deploy customized environments with hetero-geneous virtual mobile devices in order to simulate the de-ployment of these applications and analyze the monitoredQoS attributes. Perses has been integrated into a DevOpsmethodology, automating its execution before its deploymentin a real environment.II. PERSES SETUPThis section explains how to configure Perses to evaluate adistributed mobile application. The main requirements are anaccount on Github [1] and Amazon Web Service (AWS) [2].GitHub is required to maintain a repository storing the de-veloped source code of the distributed mobile application.Every new commit launch the virtual environments definedwith Perses by means of GitHub Actions [3]. AWS is usedby Perses as an infrastructure provider to host all the virtualmobile devices to be deployed. In addition, Perses requireshigh-capacity AWS .metal instances. These enable the nestedvirtualisation required for Android device virtualisation. Thisartifact will use C5.metal (Perses takes care of managingit automatically) so you should verify if your account caninstantiate that kind of instances before starting the process.1To test Perses, a distributed mobile application is required.Currently, the mobile side is only compatible with Androidmobile applications. In order to facilitate the evaluation ofPerses, the distributed mobile application of the use caseexplained in [4] is provided.Both components are accessible in public repositories 2,3.The process that should be followed to configure Perses andevaluate the application’s QoS is:1) Deployment of the server-side: To get started, it isnecessary to deploy the server-side. In its repository(Readme.md) are the instructions for the deployment.1https://github.com/perses-org/perses/blob/master/MetalVerification.md2Mobile application: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.44766713Server: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.44763712) Create the application repository: It is also necessaryto create a personal repository on GitHub to uploadthe mobile application. Please, note that in order to rungradle-based applications, the gradlew script must haveexecution rights 4). In order to ease the testing of Perses,just a fork or a clone of the provided repository can becreated that already has the execution rights.3) Virtual environment definition: A configuration file,called .perses.yml, must be created in the mobile repos-itory to define: the characteristics of the virtual environ-ment in which the behaviour of the distributed mobileapplication should be evaluated, the tests to be launchedand the desired QoS attributes that have to be checkedduring the test execution. This file must be created inthe root of the mobile application repository.For the running example, this file is already provided.In particular, three sets of Android mobile devices havebeen defined, each one consisting of 8 devices. Thedifference lies on their hardware, simulating mobiledevices with different CPU and RAM. In addition, 3performance tests have been defined for evaluating thegeneral response time of the distributed mobile applica-tion with different number of concurrent users. Finally,the QoS objective of a response time lower that twoseconds is also defined, in order to provide an adequateuser experience. An interface test with Espresso [5] hasalso been defined to evaluate the main functionality ofthe application in which the user clicks on the button tocalculate the infection risk percentage.4) Automating the execution Workflow: The execution ofPerses is automated with GitHub Actions. For this, thedifferent steps to perform (compilation of the applica-tion, installation of the necessary resources, deploymentof the virtual mobile devices, execution of the tests,etc.) should be defined in a pipeline. This pipelineis already defined and can be reused to automate theexecution of any project.5. To do this, it should becopied into the root of the mobile application repos-4https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17668265/gradlew-permission-denied5https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perses-org/gha/master/workflow/perses-workflow.ymlArtifact: Virtual Environment for Evaluating the QoS of Distributed Mobile ApplicationsSergio Laso∗, Javier Berrocal∗, Pablo Fernández†, Antonio Ruiz-Cortés† and Juan M. Murillo∗itory following the structure: .github/workflows/perses-workflow.yml. Please, note that this file is already alsoincluded in the provided example.5) AWS Credentials: In order for Perses to be able todeploy the virtual devices in AWS, it needs credentialsto access and create the necessary infrastructure. To thatend, developers have to create an user and obtain theEC2 Key Pair. To create the user, the AWS tutorialshould be followed.6. Please, note that this user musthave Programmatic access and AdministratorAccess per-mission. After creating the user, download the provided.csv file for later use. To create the EC2 Pair Key, again,the AWS tutorial should be followed.7.Please note thatthis key has to be created in the eu-west-1 region (thisis to make it easier the artifact guide) otherwise thepipeline execution will not be successful. Finally, thegenerated key should be downloaded as a .pem file.6) GitHub Secrets: to automatically deploy the virtualenvironment and execute the defined test when a newcommit is done, the encrypted environment variables onGitHub, called Secrets, are used to include the AWScredentials in the application repository. To create them,in the application repository, developers have to accessto Settings and Secrets, creating the following variables:• AWS_ACCESS_KEY. In this variable, developersshould add the Access key ID provided in the thepreviously downloaded .csv file.• AWS_SECRET_KEY is used to insert the Secretaccess key provided in the .csv file.• KEY_NAME, which contains the name of the EC2pair key (not the ID).• KEY_PEM, which stores a copy of the all contentof the .pem file.Once these steps are completed, Perses should be ready todeploy the virtual environment to evaluate the QoS.III. EVALUATING THE QOSPerses is integrated in a DevOps and a Continuous Inte-gration process. To launch Perses, it is necessary to makesome changes in the repository (e.g. modify the Readme.mdfile by including a sentence). After saving the change, Githubwill automatically launch Perses.This launch will execute thesteps defined in the above mentioned pipeline. The process ofevaluating the QoS can be reviewed accessing to the Actiontab in the GitHub repository. Figure 1 shows an example ofdifferent executions.In order to thoroughly analyze the results obtained fromeach Perses execution, developers can access to each of thelisted Perses runs by clicking on perses-test in the Jobs section.The Github Action console will be opened showing the resultsof each of the steps defined in the pipeline such as building theproject, creation of the infrastructure, deployment of the virtualdevices, test execution, etc. Figure 2 shows an excerpt of the6https://amzn.to/3nVDoQb7https://amzn.to/3sCr3UtFig. 1. GitHub Actions Main Page.content of the step Check Test Results, where the results of theperformance tests are evaluated to check if they are under thedefined response time requirement. This console also shows ifthe Espresso tests were successfully passed on each device.Fig. 2. Perses workflow.ACKNOWLEDGMENTThis work has been partially funded by the projectsRTI2018-094591-B-I00, RTI2018-101204-B-C21 andTIN2015-70560-R (MCI/AEI/FEDER,UE), the 4IE+ Project(0499-4IE-PLUS-4-E) funded by the Interreg V-A España-Portugal (POCTEP) 2014-2020 program, by the RCIS network(TIN2016-81978-REDT), by the Department of Economy andInfrastructure of the Government of Extremadura (GR18112,IB18030), by the Government of Andalusian (US-1264651)and by the European Regional Development Fund.REFERENCES[1] Github, “Github,” https://github.com, (Accessed on 19/01/2021).[2] A. W. Service, “Amazon web service,” https://aws.amazon.com/, (Ac-cessed on 19/01/2021).[3] Github, “Github actions,” https://github.com/features/actions, (Accessedon 28/10/2020).[4] S. Laso, J. Berrocal, P. Fernández, A. Ruiz-Cortés, and J. M. Murillo,“Virtual environment for evaluating the qos of distributed mobile appli-cations,” in 2021 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computingand Communications Workshops (PerCom Workshops). IEEE, 2021, pp.1–3.[5] Android, “Espresso - Android Developer,”https://developer.android.com/training/testing/espresso, (Accessed on19/01/2021).

Artifact: virtual environment for evaluating the QoS of distributed mobile applications

https://idus.us.es/bitstream/11441/132203/1/Artifact%20Virtual%20Environment%20for%20Evaluating%20the%20QoS%20of%20Distributed%20Mobile%20Applications.pdf

Artifact: virtual environment for evaluating the QoS of distributed mobile applications

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