Modelling Interactive Real-time Applications on Service Oriented Infrastructures

The European Commission supported IRMOS project is developing tools and techniques that allow realtime applications to be planned and executed on distributed Service Oriented Infrastructures (SOI) operated by third-party service providers. The exemplar applications within the project are all multimedia based and include support for interactive and collaborative film post-production, the use of virtual and augmented reality within the engineering design process, and the use of 3D virtual worlds as interactive online eLearning environments. In each case, there is a need for well defined and managed Service Level Agreements that have stringent Quality of Service (QoS) terms referring to applications hosted on third-party virtualised resources (storage, processing, networking). This paper presents techniques developed within IRMOS for modelling and predicting the resource and QoS requirements of interactive media applications on SOIs. These models have value in many stages of the application lifecycle, for example when estimating resource needs in advance of execution, when negotiating QoS with service providers, when assessing the probable technical and economic outcomes of provisioning policies and management actions if either the application or resources do not perform as expected or need to be adjusted.