QoS as a competitive advantage for distributed object systems: from enterprise objects to a global electronic market

Distributed enterprise object systems are evolving to open distributed systems in the sense that there is a growing demand for interoperability with object systems outside of the enterprise. Middleware platforms such as CORBA provide basic interoperability. In addition, for commercial environments we need quality of service (QoS) management in order to support service quality guarantees and quality depending charging for clients and services. In this paper a QoS management architecture is presented which provides a generic way to enable distributed object systems with QoS management. QoS aware objects can be shared among different enterprise object systems in the sense of a global market. Offering services with QoS guarantees and flexible charging policies will be a competitive advantage compared to the conventional best-effort services