Mobile agents and quality of service adaptation in distributed multimedia systems

While fault tolerance describes the ability of computer systems to deal with hardware and software failures, Quality of Service (QoS) research encompasses all the aspects of the management and delivery of a sound service. As fluctuations, and de gradations are inherent part of any, heterogeneous system, QoS maintenance and adaptation become crucial, parts of any end-to-end QoS provision. We propose in this paper a QoS adaptation: scheme based on the mobile agent technology. This scheme relies on the concepts of macro-adaptation as the coarse-grained adjustements, and micro-adaptation that describes all the fine-grained corrective actions done on resources. Here mobile agents are organized in a hierarchy along the components of the distributed multimedia system. Our idea in this model is to structure in an integrated and hierarchical fashion an adaptation strategy, that span all the configurations made of components selected by a QoS manager. Computation is adapted to the! available services or moved to other components if necessary. The interactions between the mobile agents and the components interfaces incorporate the adaptation; mechanisms.