Middleware Solution for QoS-Aware Ubiquitous Multimedia Service Delivery 

(May. 2000 - Nov. 2001)

A ubiquitous service deployment is emerging in the multimedia and networking area. The first difficulty comes from the dynamic heterogeneity of such environment, which is caused by the physical attributes of diversified computing appliances and different types of networks. User mobility, another basic property of ubiquitous computing, posses a great challenge to the service management. 

These challenges demand an extensive study in the areas like network services and resource management, because many traditional assumptions do not hold any more . To enforce the QoS provision in the heterogeneous environment, we must enhance the conventional multimedia system with following key features: (i) a self-adaptive service delivery framework, which is able to fit into the dynamic resource variation and application behaviors, (ii) automatic management of service configuration, such as inter-node or inter-component dependency management, dynamic reconfiguration, system consistency checking, etc., (iii) system-wise resource management, including admission control, multi-resource reservation, and global optimization of resource allocation. Significant research has been conducted on (i). However, (ii) and (iii) have not gained intensive consideration.

We stress that the above three issues are correlated and must be realized systematically. As the enabling mechanisms, (ii) and (iii) can be integrated into (i) to accomplish the user-oriented QoS-aware multimedia service deployment. Furthermore, we try to expose the implicit relationship among (ii) and (iii), i.e., service configuration manager should not only demand the resource reservation support from its underlying resource management scheme, but also seek its collaboration to make the configuration decision adapted to highly varied resource capabilities. To achieve these goals, we focus our research on the framework support for multimedia service management, which includes the integration and verification of functional/resource dependency information, automatic system configuration, and QoS-aware resource consumption optimization.

We further refine the Middleware Layer into two parts: Middleware Components Layer and SMART (Scalable Middleware Architecture with Reconfiguration Techniques) Kernel. The Middleware Components Layer is comprised of all active components, which are functionally required by the currently executing programs in the overlying Application Layer. Through the Middleware Customizing Interface, a running application can dynamically upload its required components into the middleware layer, or remove active components when they're not in use anymore. By doing so, we can consistently maintain the middleware system footprint in a smallest possible size, which are essential for the resource-competitive environment.

• Yi Cui, Klara Nahrsetedt, Supporting QoS for Ubiquitous Multimedia Service Delivery, in Proc. of ACM Multimedia 2001, Ottawa, Canada, October, 2001. [ps].
• Yi Cui, Klara Nahrstedt, QoS-Aware Dependency Management for Component-Based Systems, in Proc. of 10th International Symposium on High Performance Distributed Computing (HPDC-10), San Francisco, CA, August, 2001. [ps].
• Yi Cui, Dongyan Xu, Klara Nahrstedt, SMART: A Scalable Middleware Solution for Ubiquitous Multimedia Service Delivery, in Proc. of IEEE International Conference on Multimedia and Expo 2001 (ICME2001), Tokyo, Japan, August, 2001. [pdf].