Communication middleware and software of 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 weft as application-specific tradeoffs among them. The main intent of this paper if 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 basic in distributed real-time environments. We fist provide an analytic QoS framework Then, we elaborate on the algorithms and mechanisms to provide such network services. To empirically analyze the behavior of the proposed components, we are currently implementing them as software layers on top of Sun Salaris operating system, and comment in the paper the implementation status.