Dynamic Quality of Service Resource Management for Multimedia Applications on General Purpose Operating Systems

In conditions of overload, the performance of typical multimedia applications ranges from a general slowness to, more critically, internal time-dependent operations failing to execute by their deadlines. To address this problem, a software architecture is investigated in which a centralized Dynamic Quality of Service Manager (DQM) mediates resource usage between the operating system and the applications. Applications are written to be able to execute at a range of operating levels—a level is defined by a certain amount of resource usage and the corresponding application quality. TheDQM lowers the operating level of one or more applications when applications are performing poorly. This action immediately reduces overall resource consumption, which subsequently increases the resource availability to those applications performing poorly. Similarly, the DQM raises operating levels in conditions of underload, thus maximizing resource utilization and collective quality. Experimental results show that under certain conditions, a middleware approach to the DQM is effective, without requiring modifications to the underlying operating system. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Colorado at Denver, Denver, CO. yPermanent Address is School of Computer Science, Florida International University, Miami, FL. zThe research of this author has been supported by the National Science Foundation under grant IRI-9307619.