A QoS mechanism for component based middleware

Developers of distributed multimedia applications face a diversity of multimedia formats, streaming platforms and streaming protocols; furthermore, support for end-to-end quality-of-service (QoS) is a crucial factor for the development of future distributed multimedia and real time systems. However, quality aspects of interactions between objects cannot be specified nor enforced by current component based middleware, resulting only in a best- effort QoS support in middleware. Next generation middleware should offer abstractions for management and control of the system level QoS mechanisms, while maintaining the advantages of the distribution transparencies. The paper presents shortly the QComp framework, which represent our approach for a CCM based implementation, and discusses the design and implementation of a QoS monitoring and control mechanism integrated in the framework. The integration of the QoS support results in a QoS- enabled middleware which is representation, location and QoS transparent.