Resource control of distributed applications in heterogeneous environments

Abstract

We address, in a unified manner, different mechanisms of controlling the application's environment. Today's applications can run over distributed, heterogeneous environments: different operating systems and networks. The resources used by the applications are also distributed across the environment. Therefore, the application developer needs to implement different mechanisms in order to control the resources. Resource reservation, resource allocation, and resource control are such mechanisms; these are not platform independent but instead, are operating system- and network-dependent. These mechanisms can be presented as universal service objects to the application developer and can support functionality to control resources with respect to priorities of users and tasks. We present an implementation of "control units" for a video conference application. We apply the control units as mechanisms to enable quality of service parameters.