QoS Management Middleware: A Separable, Reusable Solution

Research in the area of end-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) has produced important results over the last years. However, most solutions are tailored for specific environments, assume layered system architectures, or integrate QoS management within the respective service components, such that the QoS management functionality is not easily reusable. Furthermore, proprietary QoS solutions are not interoperable and QoS management for logical objects is not supported. In this paper, we present a separable and reusable QoS management service for end-to-end QoS in a distributed environment. This QoS middleware extends the classical feedback controller with QoS-aware agents. We describe the resulting seven-agent QoS manager, a generic management protocol, and define interfaces between the agents, platform services, and QoS-aware application components. Wrappers can be used to interface the QoS middleware with all types of legacy distributed service components, both QoS-aware and QoS-unaware.