A meta-level architecture for QoS awareness in a mobile environment

Abstract

According to their requirements, mobile clients interact with their environments to discover local services offered by different service providers. The underlying software, either within the mobile clients or the servers, consists in different discovery protocols and a variety of heterogeneous middleware platforms such as CORBA, RMI, SOAP, etc. The diversity of discovery protocols can also be a barrier to discover the available services in the context of a mobile client. Therefore, service invocation may require a dynamic adaptation to the specific features of the middleware and those of the available discovery protocols in use. In addition, when a given service is provided by two or more providers, within the same area of the mobile clients, a decision should be made to select the most appropriate service with the best quality of service. The objective of this work is to suggest an adaptive reflective middleware named MAQAME: a Meta-level Architecture for Qos Adaptation in a Mobile Environment that provides a QoS management level to select the service having the better quality of service among the other provided local services. Firstly, we present an overview of a previous work related to an adaptable Middleware, developed for a fixed environment. Then we discuss the MAQAME components that allow a dynamic adaptation of both discovery and interaction protocols to the mobile client environment while providing the better QoS