Our research addresses two important problems that arise in modern large-scale distributed systems: (1) the necessity to virtualize their data flows by applying actions such as filtering, format translation, coalescing or splitting, etc., and (2) the desire to separate such actions from enterprise applications' business logic, to make it easier for future service-oriented codes to interoperate in diverse and dynamic environments. This paper considers the runtimes of the `information appliances' used for these purposes, particularly with respect to their ability to provide diverse levels of Quality of Service (QoS) in lieu of dynamic application behaviors and the consequent changes in the resource needs of their data flows. Our specific contribution is the enrichment of these runtimes with methods for QoS-awareness, thereby giving them the ability to deliver desired levels of QoS even under sudden requirement changes -- IQ-appliances. For experimental evaluation, we enrich a prototype implementation of an IQ-appliance, based on the Intel IXP network processor with the additional functionality needed to guarantee QoS constraints for diverse data streams. Measurements demonstrate the feasibility and utility of the approach
