Interactors: Capturing Tradeoffs in Bandwidth Versus CPU Usage for Quality of Service Constrained Objects

Abstract

Complex distributed applications, including virtual environments, and real-time multimedia require performance guarantees in the end-to-end transfer of information across a network. To make such guarantees requires the management of processing, memory, and network resources. This paper describes the Dionisys end-system quality of service (QoS) approach to specifying, translating, and enforcing end-to-end, object-level QoS constraints. Dionisys differs from previous work on QoS architectures by supporting QoS constraints on distributed shared objects, as well as multimedia streams. Consequently, we introduce 'interactors', which capture the QoS constraints and resource requirements at each stage in the generation, processing, and transfer of information between multiple cooperating objects. Using interactors, Dionisys is able to coordinate both thread and packet-level scheduling, so that information is processed and transmitted at matching rates. However, there are tradeoffs in the use of CPU cycles for scheduling and the need to meet QoS constraints on the information transferred between interacting objects. We show, empirically, the packet scheduling frequency to minimize CPU overheads while maximizing bandwidth usage.