QuO's Runtime Support for Quality of Service in Distributed Objects

Citation: Vanegas R, Zinky JA, Loyall JP, Karr DA, Schantz RE, Bakken DE. QuO's Runtime Support for Quality of Service in Distributed Objects. Proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing (Middleware'98), 15-18 September 1998, The Lake District, England.

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Abstract Most distributed applications are brittle; they work in a limited environment and cannot adapt to changes in this environment. Making these applications less brittle is a complex engineering task that is hard for specific application areas and even harder to generalize. The Quality Objects (QuO) project offers a framework for creating applications that adapt to different Quality of Services (QoS) offered by the underlying resources. QuO offers several layers of tools for creating adaptive distributed applications using the familiar CORBA development process of code generators and runtime support libraries. In this paper we describe the QuO Runtime and the components it uses to maintain and adapt to QoS. The QuO Runtime is the base functionality on which QuO code generators specialize for a specific adaptive application. The QuO Runtime handles much of the complexity of collecting, organizing, and acting on changing QoS, thus reducing the burden for application developers.

This paper is one in a series of papers about the QuO system and concentrates on the first runtime implementation of QuO and our design tradeoffs.