Abstract not found

. Distributed object middleware, such as CORBA, hides systemand network-specific characteristics of objects behind functional interface specifications. This simplifies development and maintenance of distributed objects, contributing to their growing acceptance. Critical applications have Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, however, such as real-time performance, dependability, or security, that are hidden by middleware. Because of this, application developers often bypass distributed object systems, thus gaining little or no advantage from the middleware. We have developed Quality Objects (QuO), a framework for developing distributed applications with QoS requirements. QuO provides a set of aspect languages, called Quality Description Languages (QDL), for specifying possible QoS states, the system resources and mechanisms for measuring and controlling QoS, and behavior for adapting to changing levels of available QoS at runtime. This paper describes QuO's aspect languages, their usa...

. The design and operation of very large-scale storage systems is an area ripe for application of automated design and management techniques -- and at the heart of such techniques is the need to represent storage system QoS in many guises: the goals (service level requirements) for the storage system, predictions for the design that results, enforcement constraints for the runtime system to guarantee, and observations made of the system as it runs. Rome is the information model that the Storage Systems Program at HP Laboratories has developed to address these needs. We use it as an "information bus" to tie together our storage system design, configuration, and monitoring tools. In 5 years of development, Rome is now on its third iteration; this paper describes its information model, with emphasis on the QoS-related components, and presents some of the lessons we have learned over the years in using it. 1.

Application or web services are increasingly being used across organisational boundaries. Moreover, new services are being introduced at the network and storage level. Languages to specify interfaces for such services have been researched and transferred into industrial practice. We investigate end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and highlight that QoS provision has multiple facets and requires complex agreements between network services, storage services and middleware services. We introduce SLAng, a language for defining Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that accommodates these needs. We illustrate how SLAng is used to specify QoS in a case study that uses a web services specification to support the processing of images across multiple domains and we evaluate our language based on it.

An important requirement for pervasive computing systems is the ability to adapt at runtime to handle varying resources, user mobility, changing user needs, and system faults. In this paper we describe an approach in which dynamic adaptation is supported by the use of software architectural models to monitor an application and guide dynamic changes to it. The use of externalized models permits one to make reconfiguration decisions based on a global perspective of the running system, apply analytic models to determine correct repair strategies, and gauge the effectiveness of repair through continuous system monitoring. We illustrate the application of this idea to pervasive computing systems, focusing on the need to adapt based on performance-related criteria and models.

The Quality Objects (Quo) middleware is a set of ex-tensions to standard distributed object computing mid-dleware that is used to control and adapt quality of serv-ice in a number of distributed application environments, from wide-area to embedded distributed applications. This paper compares and contrasts the characteristics of key use cases and the variations in Quo implementations that have emerged to support them. We present these variations in the context of several actual applications being developed using the QUO middleware. 1.

Recent work in opening up distributed object systems to make them suitable for applications needing quality of service control has had the side effect of increasing the complexity in setting up, configuring, and initializing such applications. Configuration of distributed applications is more complicated than that of non-distributed applications, simply because of the heterogeneous and distributed nature of the application’s components. CORBA and other distributed object middleware simplifies the configuration of distributed object applications, but hides much of the information and control necessary to achieve quality of service (QoS). This paper describes the techniques and tools that we have developed within our Quality Objects (QuO) framework for simplifying the configuration of distributed applications with QoS attributes. We describe a QuO configuration language, as well as the specific configuration needs of particular QoS properties – real-time, security, and dependability – and the support we provide for them. 1.

In this paper, we introduce an XML-based Hierarchical QoS Markup Language, called HQML, to enhance distributed multimedia applications on the World Wide Web (WWW) with Quality of Service (QoS) capability. The design of HQML is based on two observations: (1) the absence of a systematic QoS specification language, that can be used by distributed multimedia applications on the WWW to utilize the state-of-the-art QoS management technology; and (2) the power and popularity of XML to deliver richly structured contents over the Web. HQML allows distributed multimedia applications to specify all kinds of application-specific QoS policies and requirements. During runtime, the HQML Executor translates the HQML file into desired data structures and cooperates with the QoS proxies that assist applications in end-to-end QoS negotiation, setup and enforcement. In order to make QoS services tailored toward user preferences and meet the challenges of uncertainty in the distributed heterogeneous environments, the design of HQML is featured as interactive and flexible. In order to allow application developers to create HQML specifications correctly and easily, we have designed and developed a unified visual QoS programming environment, called QoSTalk. In QoSTalk, we adopt a grammatical approach to perform consistency check on the visual QoS specifications and generate HQML files automatically. Finally, we introduce the distributed QoS compiler, which performs the automatic mappings between application and resource level QoS parameters to relieve the application developer of the burden of dealing with low level QoS specifications. keywords Quality of Service, XML, Distributed Multimedia Applications, Visual Programming Environment 1

Adaptation of distributed software to maintain the best possible application performance in the face of changes in available resources is an increasingly important and complex problem. We discuss the application of the QuO adaptive middleware framework and the CORBA A/V Streaming Service to the development of real-time embedded applications. We demonstrate a standards-based middleware platform for developing adaptive applications that are better architected and easier to modify and that can adapt to changes in resource availability to meet QoS requirements. These are presented in the context of a video distribution application. The application is developed using QuO and the A/V Streaming Service, and uses adaptive behavior to meet timeliness requirements in the face of restrictions in processing power and network bandwidth. We present experimental results we have gathered for this application. 1.

As networks and the use of communication within applications continue to grow and find more uses, so too does the demand for more control and manageability of various “system properties ” through middleware. An important component supporting an integrated property architecture is the concept of an object gateway, which is a quality-ofservice (QoS) aware element transparently inserted at the transport layer between clients and objects to provide the managed communication behavior for the particular property being supported. In this paper, we introduce the concept of a QoS-oriented gateway to integrate a variety of QoS enforcement and implementation mechanisms controlling the underlying distributed interactions. We discuss the functions performed by such a component in achieving the desired overall end-to-end QoS, and the design considerations underlying our current implementation. We conclude with experiences to date with two variations of the gateway: one controlling managed latency and throughput using bandwidth allocation, and one controlling dependability through the coordination of object replicas. 1.