NetQoPE: A Model-driven Network QoS Provisioning Engine for Distributed Real-time and Embedded Systems

This paper provides two contributions to the study of quality of service (QoS)-enabled middleware that supports the network QoS requirements of distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems. First, we describe the design and implementation of NetQoPE, which is a model-driven component middleware framework that shields applications from the details of network QoS mechanisms by (1) speci-fying per-flow network QoS requirements, (2) performing resource allocation and validation decisions (such as ad-mission control), and (3) enforcing per-flow network QoS at runtime. Second, we empirically evaluate NetQoPE’s capabilities on a representative DRE system that deploys reusable software code in a range of deployment con-texts. Our results demonstrate that NetQoPE can pro-vide network-level differentiated performance to each of those application flows without modifying their program-ming model or source code, thereby providing greater flex-ibility and extensibility in leveraging network-layer mecha-nisms.