Distributed QoS compilation and runtime instantiation

The rapid growth and coexistence of different application domains, such as multimedia and electronic commerce, present a significant challenge to the provision of their quality of service (QoS). To solve this challenge, we need a unified QoS framework, which allows flexibility and reconfigurability. In this paper, we present a reconfigurable component-based QoS framework, called 2K^Q, which solves the challenge by partitioning the end-to-end QoS setup process into distributed QoS compilation and runtime QoS instantiation phases for different types of applications. Entities, services and protocols of this framework, such as application-to-component translator and component-to-resources translators, achieve the distributed QoS compilation and prepare all necessary QoS structures for the end-to-end QoS setup. Other capabilities of this framework, such as a reconfigurable middleware and functional adaptation, achieve the runtime instantiation of the end-to-end QoS setup. We have implemented the first prototype of this framework and the results show a feasible overhead of the runtime service instantiation and reconfiguration for different applications and their QoS requirements.