A Real-time Service Oriented Infrastructure

The advancements in distributed computing have driven the emergence of service-based infrastructures that allow for on-demand provision of ICT assets. Taking into consideration the complexity of distributed environments, significant challenges exist in providing and managing the offered on-demand resources with the required level of Quality of Service (QoS), especially for real-time interactive and streaming applications. In this paper we propose an approach for providing real-time QoS guarantees by enhancing service oriented infrastructures with coherent and consistent real-time attributes at various levels (application, network, storage, processing). The approach considers the full lifecycle of service-based systems including service engineering, Service Level Agreement (SLA) negotiation and management, service provisioning and monitoring. QoS parameters at application, platform and infrastructure levels are given specific attention as the basis for provisioning policies in the context of temporal constraints.