Supporting quality of service in a non-dedicated opportunistic environment

In this paper we investigate the utilization of non-dedicated, opportunistic resources in a desktop environment to provide statistical assurances to a class of QoS sensitive, soft real-time applications. Supporting QoS in such an environment presents unique challenges: (1) Soft real-time tasks must have continuous access to resources in order to deliver meaningful services. Therefore the tasks will fail if not enough idle resources are available in the system. (2) Although soft real-time tasks can be migrated from one machine to another, their QoS may be affected if there are frequent migrations. In this paper, we define two new QoS metrics (task failure rate and probability of bad migrations,) to characterize these QoS failures/degradations. We also design admission control and resource recruitment algorithms to provide statistical guarantees on these metrics. Our model based simulation results show that the admission control algorithms are effective at providing the desired level of assurances, and are robust to different resource usage patterns. Our resource recruitment algorithm may need long time of observations to provide the desired guarantee. But even with moderate observations, we can reduce the probability of a bad migration from 12% to less than 4%, which is good enough for most real applications.