DynaQoS©‐RDF: a best effort for QoS‐assurance of dynamic reconfiguration of dataflow systems

Abstract

AbstractThe significance of QoS‐assurance is being increasingly recognized by both the research and wider communities. In the latter case, this recognition is driven by the increasing adoption by business of 24/7 software systems and the QoS decline that end‐users experience when these systems undergo dynamic reconfiguration. At the beginning of 2006, the author set up a project named DynaQoS©‐RDF (QoS‐assurance of Dynamic Reconfiguration on Reconfigurable Dataflow Model), which was then sponsored by the CQ University Australia. Over the last two years, the author has investigated QoS‐assurance for dataflow systems, which are characterized by the pipe‐and‐filter architecture. The research has addressed issues such as: the global consistency of protocol transactions, the necessary and sufficient conditions for QoS‐assurance, execution overhead control for reconfiguration, state transfer for stateful components, and the design of a QoS benchmark. This paper discusses these research issues. It also proposes various QoS strategies and presents a benchmark for evaluating QoS‐assurance strategies for the dynamic reconfiguration of dataflow systems. This benchmark is implemented using the DynaQoS©‐RDF v1.0 software platform. Various strategies, including those from the research literature are benchmarked, and the best efforts for QoS‐assurance are identified. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.