QoS-Aware Meta-Data Compiler for Ubiquitous Multimedia Applications

The reusability of available multimedia and middleware services brings new challenges for enabling flexible and efficient development and deployment of distributed end-to-end multimedia applications with specific Quality-of-Service(QoS) in ubiquitous environments. The main challenges in reusing available components include understanding and utilizing of domain-specific components and middlewares with various semantics, and enabling their QoS-aware interoperability in ubiquitous environments that resource fluctuations, device and service changes are a common phenomenon. This paper presents a QoS-aware meta-data compiler framework that provides a solution for the challenges. The framework extends standard component construction and composition with QoS-related meta-data. It defines a set of QoS-aware models and meta-data translation models that are essential for modelling QoS consistency. The framework also enables QoS-aware semantics and interfaces for interoperability among connected components forming a QoS-aware multimedia application. Besides the defined models, the framework introduces an architecture that integrates the models with a set of high-level specifications, a meta-data compiler protocol, and a run-time support to form a programming environment, called Q-Compiler. The Q-Compiler helps to automate the development and deployment of a component-based, QoS-aware application, deployable in ubiquitous environments. To validate the viability of the Q-Compiler, we use it to develop a mobile Video-on-Demand application in an active space project. The experimental results show that the introduction of a translator code between connected components does not degrade the overall service quality of the components. Although the main contributions of the framework are validated via multimedia domain, we anticipate that fundamental concepts and design will be applicable to other application domains