A quality of service management testbed

Today's computing environments are becoming more and more distributed in nature. At the same time, the applications used in these environments are becoming more complicated and are being used in more mission critical roles in the enterprise. Consequently, users demands for performance, reliability, and availability are increasing rapidly. To meet these needs, a high level of quality of service must be delivered to the user. Doing so, however, is not an easy task. Because of considerable research effort into this area, we are making great strides towards acceptable quality of service solutions. To facilitate continuing work in this area, we must have access to a tightly controllable, highly portable, and flexible environment suitable for quality of service experimentation. Not only is such an experimental testbed useful for gaining valuable insight into developing better quality of service solutions, but it is also required for evaluating the merit of these solutions. To address this problem, we have developed a testbed for carrying out experimentation into quality of service management. We present our initial requirements for the testbed, its design, and a prototype implementation. We describe experimentation to date and evaluate the testbed and its effectiveness based on these preliminary results. Finally, we conclude with a summary of our work and outline our plans to evolve the testbed to accommodate further experimentation and work in the future.