A Real-time Service Oriented Infrastructure

Abstract

Service oriented environments and real-time systems
have been two mutually exclusive technological areas. Taking
into consideration the main concepts of service orientation,
significant challenges exist in providing and managing the
offered on-demand resources with the required level of Quality of
Service (QoS), especially for real-time interactive and streaming
applications. In this paper we propose an approach for providing
real-time QoS guarantees by enhancing service oriented
infrastructures with coherent and consistent real-time attributes
at various levels (application, network, storage, processing). The
approach considers the full lifecycle of service-based systems
including service engineering, Service Level Agreement (SLA)
negotiation and management, service provisioning and
monitoring. QoS parameters at application, platform and
infrastructure levels are given specific attention as the basis for
provisioning policies in the context of temporal constraints. We
also demonstrate through use cases the need for real-time
scheduling as a fundamental process to provide QoS guarantees.