Addressing timeliness/accuracy/cost tradeoffs in information collection for dynamic environments

In this paper, we focus on addressing the tradeoffs between timeliness, accuracy and cost for applications requiring real-time information collection in distributed real-time environments. In this scenario, information consumers require data from information sources at varying levels of accuracy and timeliness. To accommodate the diverse characteristics of information sources and varying requirements from information consumers, we use an information mediator to coordinate and facilitate communication between information sources and consumers. We develop algorithms for real-time request scheduling and directory service maintenance and compare our techniques with several other proposed strategies. Our studies indicate that the judicious composition of our proposed intelligent policies can improve the overall efficiency of the system. Furthermore, the proposed policies perform very well as the system scales in the number of information sources and consumer requests.