Quality of Service (QoS) management is a growing demand on distributed systems. The existing approaches for QoS management focus mainly on special topics of QoS (i.e. realtime issues, multimedia, fault tolerance). A general, generic approach is missing. Our goal is to design and implement a generic QoS framework for object-oriented middleware platforms.

QoS integration in object-oriented middleware seems a good choice, because of the object model's suitability for distributed applications and the popularity of such middleware platforms. In this talk an approach to enhance the object model by generic QoS management will be presented. Our architecture (called MAQS) builds on CORBA. MAQS extends CORBA by a generic QoS management framework. By using an object-oriented middleware and enhancing it, the advantages of object-orientation (e.g. abstraction, encapsulation, reusability etc.) are gained for both, the QoS handling and the service. In contrast to existing approaches MAQS aimes at an open architecture which will allow the specification and implementation of a broad variety of different QoS. Our prototype is built on MICO, a public-domain CORBA 2.0 implementation.

The talk is divided into three parts. First an overview of QoS and existing approaches is given. After that the MAQS architecture and how it meets the described demands will be presented. The talk closes with the project status and an outlook on the next steps in our work.