Memory monitoring in a multi-tenant OSGi execution environment

Abstract

Smart Home market players aim to deploy component-based and service-oriented applications from untrusted third party providers on a single OSGi execution environment. This creates the risk of resource abuse by buggy and malicious applications, which raises the need for resource monitoring mechanisms. Existing resource monitoring solutions either are too intrusive or fail to identify the relevant resource consumer in numerous multi-tenant situations. This paper proposes a system to monitor the memory consumed by each tenant, while allowing them to continue communicating directly to render services. We propose a solution based on a list of configurable resource accounting rules between tenants, which is far less intrusive than existing OSGi monitoring systems. We modified an experimental Java Virtual Machine in order to provide the memory monitoring features for the multi-tenant OSGi environment. Our evaluation of the memory monitoring mechanism on the DaCapo benchmarks shows an overhead below 46%.