Adaptive and Reflective Middleware for QoS-Enabled CCM Applications

Abstract

Existing middleware specifications, such as Real-Time CORBA and CORBA Messaging, address many quality-of-service (QoS) properties by defining policies that control connection multiplexing, request priority, queuing order, routing, and dependability. They do not, however, define strategies for configuring these QoS properties into applications flexibly, transparently, and adaptively. Application developers must therefore make these configuration decisions manually. This process is tedious and error-prone, and suboptimal for complex distributed realtime and embedded (DRE) systems. Although the recently adopted CORBA Component Model (CCM) defines a standard configuration framework for packaging and deployingsoftware components, conventional CCM implementations focus on functionality rather than adaptive QoS, which makes the CCM currently unsuitable for DRE applications withdemanding QoS requirements.