Communication middleware and software for QoS control in distributed real-time environments

There has been an increasing need of highly predictable, timely, and dependable communication services with QoS guarantees on an end-to-end basis either for embedded real-time applications or for multimedia-integrated distributed control. Performance objectives used in conventional networks-such as maximizing the throughput, minimizing the response time, or providing fairness to users-are not of the most important concern for both types of applications. Instead, resources should be appropriately reserved and managed to support multidimensional quality of service (QoS) on an end-to-end basis, as well as application-specific tradeoffs among them. The main intent of the paper is thus to address and demonstrate an environment-an integrated set of network resource management techniques, middleware layers, and network software-for supporting multi-dimensional QoS on an end-to-end basis in distributed real-time environments. The authors first provide an analytic QoS framework Then, they elaborate on the algorithms and mechanisms to provide such network services. To empirically analyze the behavior of the proposed components, they are currently implementing them as software layers on top of the Sun Solaris operating system, and comment on the implementation status