Management of Application Quality of Service

This paper proposes a new language for the development of distributed multimedia applications: Quality Assurance Language (QuAL). QuAL abstractions allow the specification of Quality of Service (QoS) constraints expected from the underlying computing and communication environment. QuAL specifications are compiled into run time components that monitor the actual QoS delivered. Upon QoS violations, application provided exception handlers are signaled to act upon the faulty events. Language level abstractions of QoS shelter programs from the heterogeneity of underlying infrastructures. This simplifies the development and maintenance of multimedia applications and promotes their portability and reuse. QuAL generates Management Information Bases (MIBs) that contain QoS statistics per application. Such MIBs may be used to integrate application level QoS management into standard network management frameworks

QoSME: QoS Management Environment

Distributed multimedia applications are sensitive to the Quality of Service (QoS) delivered by underlying communication networks. For example, a video conference exchange can be very sensitive to the effective network throughput. Network jitter can greatly disrupt a speech stream. The main question this thesis addresses is how to adapt multimedia applications to the QoS delivered by the network and vice versa. Such adaptation is especially important because current networks are unable to assure the QoS required by applications and the latter is usually unprepared for periods of QoS degradation. This work introduces the QoS Management Environment (QoSME) that provides mechanisms for such adaptation. The main contributions of this thesis are: Language level abstractions for QoS management. The Quality Assurance Language (QuAL) in QoSME enables the specification of how to allocate, monitor, analyze, and adapt to delivered QoS. Applications can express in QuAL their QoS needs and how to handle potential violations. Automatic QoS monitoring. QoSME automatically generates the instrumentation to monitor QoS when applications use QuAL constructs. The QoSME runtime scrutinizes interactions among applications, transport protocols, and Operating Systems (OS) and collects in QoS Management Information Bases (MIBs) statistics on the QoS delivered. Integration of QoS and standard network management. A Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agent embedded in QoSME provides QoS MIB access to SNMP managers. The latter can use this feature to monitor end-to-end QoS delivery and adapt network resource allocation and operations accordingly. A partial prototype of QoSME has been released for public access. It runs on SunOS 4.3 and Solaris 2.3 and supports communication on ATM adaptation layer, ST-II, UDP/IP, TCP/IP, and Unix internal protocols

QuAL: Quality Assurance Language

Distributed multimedia applications are sensitive to the Quality of Services (QoS) provided by their computing and communication environment. For example, scheduling of processing activities or network queueing delays may cause excessive jitter in a speech stream, rendering it difficult to understand. It is thus important to establish effective technologies to ensure delivery of QoS required by distributed multimedia applications. This proposal presents a new language for the development of distributed multimedia applications: Quality Assurance Language (QuAL). QuAL abstractions allow the specification of QoS constraints expected from the underlying computing and communication environment. QuAL specifications are compiled into run time components that monitor the actual QoS delivered. Upon QoS violations, application provided exception handlers are signaled to act upon the faulty events. Language level abstractions of QoS shelter programs from the heterogeneity of underlying infrastructures. This simplifies the development and maintenance of multimedia applications and promotes their portability and reuse. QuAL generates Management Information Bases (MIBs) that contain QoS statistics per application. Such MIBs may be used to integrate application level QoS management into standard network management frameworks

Management of Application Quality of Service

This paper proposes a new language for the development of distributed multimedia applications: Quality Assurance Language (QuAL). QuAL abstractions allow the specification of Quality of Service (QoS) con-straints expected from the underlying computing and communication environment. QuAL specifications are compiled into run time components that monitor the actual QoS delivered. Upon QoS violations, application provided exception handlers are signaled to act upon the faulty events. Language level abstractions of QoS shelter programs from the heterogeneity of underlying infrastructures. This simplifies the development and maintenance of multimedia applications and promotes their portability and reuse. QuAL generates Management Information Bases (MIBs) that contain QoS statistics per application. Such MIBs may be used to integrate application level QoS management into standard network management frameworks.

QuAL: Quality Assurance Language (Thesis Proposal)

Distributed multimedia applications are sensitive to the Quality of Services (QoS) provided by their computing and communication environment. For example, scheduling of processing activities or network queueing delays may cause excessive jitter in a speech stream, rendering it difficult to understand. It is thus important to establish effective technologies to ensure delivery of QoS required by distributed multi-media applications. This proposal presents a new language for the development of distributed multimedia applications: Quality Assurance Language (QuAL). QuAL abstractions allow the specification of QoS constraints ex-pected from the underlying computing and communication environment. QuAL specifications are compiled into run time components that monitor the actual QoS delivered. Upon QoS violations, application pro-vided exception handlers are signaled to act upon the faulty events. Language level abstractions of QoS shelter programs from the heterogeneity of underlying infrastructures. This simplifies the development and maintenance of multimedia applications and promotes their portability and reuse. QuAL generates Management Information Bases (MIBs) that contain QoS statistics per application. Such MIBs may be used to integrate application level QoS management into standard network management frameworks