APPARATUS AND METHOD FOR COMPUTING THE PROCESSING DELAY OF ADAPTIVE APPLICATIONS NETWORK TERMINALS AND APPLICATIONS THEREOF

Method and apparatus for computing the processing delay of a terminal running a system of one or more adaptive applications, each adaptive application consisting of a set of executable tasks sharing system resources, the set of execution tasks having execution times depending on a particular adaptation level, the method including the steps of: modelling the adaptation of each adaptive application as an adaptation process having steady-state probability distribution representing the fraction of time spent by the application in a particular adaptation level; modelling execution time variations of tasks in each application, for a particular adaptation level, by a random variable of arbitrary and known probability distribution; modeling a system-wide computation by a state process for capturing transitions of executing tasks as the tasks currently use or contend for the shared system resources, the state process being characterized as a stochastic process; calculating a stationary distribution .pi..sup.M from the stochastic state process; and, from the stationary distribution, calculating the processing delay of the adaptive applications.