QoS management specification support for multimedia middleware

Middleware technologies are now widely used in order to provide support for the interaction of systems relying on different hardware and operating systems. At present middleware platforms, however, do not provide enough support for both the configuration and reconfiguration of quality of service (QoS) management aspects of real-time applications such as distributed multimedia systems. That is, current middleware only provides support for the low-level specification of QoS properties. This paper presents an architecture description language (ADL) called Xelha for the high-level specification of QoS management in multimedia middleware whereas lower-level aspects can be tuned by using an aspect-oriented suite of languages referred to as resource configuration description language (RCDL). Tool support is also provided for the interpretation of the Xelha and RCDL languages. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.