Adaptable Binding for Quality of Service in Highly Networked Applications

The Internet is a desirable platform for many new forms of distributed applications in business, science, and education. A side effect emerging from rapid widespread and uneven acceptance and fast paced new extensions of the Internet communication technology base is the varying operating conditions under which a distributed application can be expected to be running. For mission critical applications especially, and for maximum user satisfaction in general, effectively selecting and controlling the operating environment and behavior of these applications adaptively, without introducing significant software complexity, is a problem which ranges from difficult to impossible, depending on how much adaptivity is needed. A key part of the problem is a limited ability to easily identify and react to changes in anticipated operating conditions without damaging the integrity of the application. We are developing a Quality of Service based middleware layer imposed between applications and the Internet as a potential general architectural solution. This middleware makes it significantly easier to develop and control application behavior under variable and changing operating conditions. We describe the background motivating this work, the components of our object computing based middleware solution, and show how components of this middleware are being used right now as part of a test and evaluation in the current Internet