Supporting Multimedia Service Polymorphism in Dynamic and Heterogeneous Environments

Future multimedia services are expected to be available anytime, anywhere, and by using any computing device. However, clients of a multimedia service may vary significantly in their processing capability and network connectivity. In addition, even between the same multimedia service provider and client, there may be dynamic variation in end-to-end resource availability. In such a dynamic and heterogeneous environment, the challenge in multimedia service is to provide each client with satisfactory Quality of Service (QoS), under the constraint of current end-to-end resource availability. Many existing QoS adaptation techniques are very service-specific, and targets only specific types of critical resources. In this paper, we present Servipoly, an enabling framework for multimedia service provision in dynamic and heterogeneous environments. Instead of providing a specific technique, Servipoly provides uniform programming interface, architecture, and runtime support that integrate and dynamically select from various service-specific QoS techniques. The key idea behind Servipoly is QoS and resource-aware service polymorphism: the same multimedia service can be delivered in multiple forms, called service configurations. Each service configuration consists of a different set of service components, which are suitable for service delivery under a certain resource condition. At runtime, Servipoly dynamically selects an appropriate service configuration for each service request, based on the current end-to-end resource availability. The selected service configuration then delivers the service with customized and satisfactory QoS to the requesting client. We have implemented a prototype of Servipoly framework, and validated it by building an example Video Streaming (VS) service on top of it. Our experimental results show the soundness of Servipoly.

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