QoS-aware admission control and dynamic resource provisioning framework in ubiquitous multimedia computing environments

A ubiquitous service deployment is emerging in the multimedia, networking, and wireless mobile computing area. Therefore, there has been an increasing demand for ubiquitous computing environments to support a certain degree of quality of service (QoS) to meet various service requirements from different computing and networking applications, and to better utilize the computing resources. However, supporting QoS in the ubiquitous computing environments has also raised great concerns regarding the applicability of any QoS solution. Management of such ubiquitous multimedia applications requires new mechanisms, i.e., Soft-QoS framework, to be developed for admission control, negotiation, allocation, and scheduling. In this paper, we present a novel negotiated admission control algorithm that exploits the degradability property of applications to improve the performance of the system. The algorithm is based on setting aside a portion of the resources as reserves and managing it intelligently, so that the total utility of the system can be maximized. The mixed greedy and predictive strategy leads to an efficient protocol that also improves the system performance. We use the constructs of application benefit functions and resource demand functions in the integrated admission control and negotiation protocol. We applied our Soft-QoS framework to the admission controlling and resource scheduling for ubiquitous multimedia devices such as Continuous Media (CM) or Video-On-Demand (VOD) servers, where multimedia applications can generally tolerate certain variations on QoS parameters by providing multiple classes with consistently proportional rather than absolute QoS. Extensive simulation experiments are presented in the paper to evaluate the performance of the novel mechanisms and compare it against some other methods used in the past.