End-to-end quality of service management for distributed real-time embedded applications

Many of the world's most critical systems are distributed real-time embedded (DRE) systems, with mission-critical quality of service (QoS) requirements. However, because of their nature - heterogeneous nodes and links, shared and constrained resources, and deployment in dynamic environments - providing QoS requires coordinated QoS management throughout the system of multiple end-to-end application streams competing for shared resources. It requires dynamic resource allocation to these end-to-end application streams based on potentially changing mission requirements and shaping application behaviors to effectively use the resources that are allocated. In this paper, we describe the issues involved with providing end-to-end QoS management in DRE systems, an architecture we have designed to support system-wide end-to-end QoS management, and a multi-UAV surveillance and target tracking application we are using to evaluate these technologies.