Applying Adaptive Middleware to Manage End-to-End QoS for Next-generation Distributed Applications

Delivering end-to-end quality of service (QoS) for diverse classes of distributed applications remains a significant R&D challenge. While individual technologies based on prior research have touched upon these QoS delivery problems for specific domains or usage patterns, these isolated achievements have yielded only a fraction of the potential benefit for the broad domain of QoS-enabled distributed applications. We present our coordinated middleware-based strategy for broadening delivery of, and simplifying from the user’s perspective, end-to-end QoS to a wider range of next-generation QoSenabled distributed applications. This paper makes the following contributions to research on end-to-end QoS. First, we describe an architecture for integrating and coordinating QoS technologies (1) at all levels of the system, (2) on all time scales of system development, deployment, and operation, and (3) across all system resources. Second, we describe results from several projects implementing particular segments of this overall architecture. We analyze these results and summarize how our work can be applied more broadly to future research on middleware for nextgeneration QoS-enabled applications. This work was supported in part by Boeing, BBN, DARPA contract 9701516, and DARPA Quorum program contract F#0602-98-C-0187 monitored by Rome Air Force Laboratory.