A Reflective Runtime Environment for Dynamic Adaptation of Streaming Media on Resource Constrained Devices

Over the past few years, a considerable amount of effort has been made in improving the QoS in computer networks. The associated problems become further complicated when the applications are resource intensive, links involved are wireless and the applications are required to execute on small mobile devices (e.g; PDAs). In such scenarios, the applications are desired to adapt to changing network/environmental conditions to give a relatively stable user perceived QoS or in the worst case, go for a graceful degradation. In this paper we describe the architecture, implementation and evaluation of our adaptive runtime environment (ARE) which runs on top of JVM. We exploit application-side adaptation and our approach is based around aspect oriented programming (AOP) to design a reflective runtime environment, spatially and temporally optimized for small foot-print devices. A key feature of this environment is that it is completely free of any user involvement for QoS specification, even then, intelligent enough to make any a/v application adaptive.