Towards integrated runtime solutions in QoS-aware middleware

Future-generation multimedia applications are expected to be highly scalable to a wide variety of heterogeneous devices, and highly available across wide-area distributed environments. This demands multiple stages of run-time support in QoS-aware middleware architectures, particularly, probing the performance of QoS parameters, instantiating the initial component configurations, and adapting to on-the-fly variations. In this paper, we review past experiences and lessons learned in our existing architectures with respect to run-time support, and present a novel approach to unify these stages into an integrated run-time middleware architecture, so that multimedia applications are monitored and configured in a coherent fashion.