QoS-aware resource management for distributed multimedia applications

Abstract

The ability of operating system and network infrastructure to provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS) guarantees in multimedia is a major acceptance factor for various distributed multimedia applications due to the temporal audio-visual and sensory information in these applications. Our constraints on the end-to-end guarantees are (1) QoS should be achieved on a general-purpose platform with a real-time extension support, and (2) QoS should be application-controllable. In order to achieve the users' acceptance requirements and to satisfy our constraints on the multimedia systems, we need a QoS-compliant resource management which supports QoS negotiation, admission and reservation mechanisms in an integrated and accessible way. In this paper we present a new resource model and a time-variant QoS management, which are the major components of the QoS-compliant resource management. The resource model incorporates, the resource scheduler, and a new component, the resource broker, which provides negotiation, admission and reservation capabilities for sharing resources such as CPU, network or memory corresponding to requested QoS. The resource brokers are intermediary resource managers; when combined with the resource schedulers, they provide a more predictable and finer granularity control of resources to the applications during the end-to-end multimedia communication than what is available in current general-purpose networked systems. Furthermore, this paper presents the QoS-aware resource management model called QualMan, as a loadable middleware, its design, implementation, results, tradeoffs, and experiences. There are tradeoffs when comparing our QualMan QoS-aware resource management in middleware and other QoSsupporting resource management solutions...