Virtualised e-Learning with real-time guarantees on the IRMOS platform

In this paper we focus on how Quality of Service guarantees are provided to virtualised applications in the Cloud Computing infrastructure that is being developed in the context of the IRMOS European Project. Provisioning of proper timeliness guarantees to distributed real-time applications involves the careful use of real-time scheduling mechanisms at the virtual-machine hypervisor level, of QoS-aware networking protocols and of proper design methodologies and tools for stochastic modelling of the application. The paper focuses on how we applied these techniques to a case-study involving a real e-Learning mobile content delivery application that has been integrated into the IRMOS platform and its achieved performance.