Total quality of service provisioning in middleware and applications

Commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) distribution middleware is gaining acceptance in the distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) community. Existing COTS specifications, however, do not effectively separate quality of service (QoS) policy configurations and adaptations from application functionality. DRE application developers therefore often intersperse code that provisions resources for QoS guarantees and program adaptation mechanisms throughout DRE applications, making it hard to configure, validate, modify, and evolve complex DRE applications. This paper illustrates (1) how standard component-based middleware can be enhanced to flexibly compose static QoS provisioning policies with application logic, (2) how adaptive middleware capabilities enable developers to abstract and encapsulate reusable dynamic QoS provisioning and adaptive behaviors, and (3) how component-based middleware and adaptive middleware capabilities can be integrated to provide a total QoS provisioning solution for DRE applications.