An Autonomic Middleware Solution for Coordinating Multiple QoS Controls

Adaptive self-managing applications can adapt their behavior through components that monitor the application behavior and provide feedback controls. This paper outlines an autonomic approach to coordinate multiple controls for managing service quality using executable control models. In this approach, controls are modeled as process models. Moreover, controls with cross-cutting concerns are provisioned by a dedicated process model. The flexibility of this approach allows composing new controls from existing control components. The coordination of their dependencies is performed within a unified architecture framework for modeling, deploying and executing these models. We integrate the process modeling and execution techniques into a middleware architecture to deliver such features. To demonstrate the practical utilization of this approach, we employ it to manage fail-over and over-loading controls for a service oriented loan brokering application. The empirical results further validate that this solution is not only sensitive to resolving cross-cutting interests of multiple controls, but also lightweight as it incurs low computational overhead.