IKTA4-026 Project: Dynamic Broker Service for Improving Quality of Database Access and Resource Usage

Kondorosi Károly dr. PhD <kondor@iit.bme.hu>

BME IIT

László Zoltán dr. <laszlo@iit.bme.hu>

BME IIT

Goldschmidt Balázs <balage@inf.bme.hu>

BME IIT

Kelen András <andras.kelen@triad.hu>

TRIAD Számítástechikai és Szolgáltató Kft.

Böszörményi László prof. dr. <laszlo.boeszoermenyi@itec.uni-klu.ac.at>

Universität Klagenfurt, ITEC

A key problem now in distributed systems is the resources management. As in the present time, there is no tool in our knowledge that could handle the whole problem domain by common principles from a global point of view. There is yet a considerable demand for such a tool in real-time and multimedia systems.

The practical problem is the development of a new resource broker. The aim of the broker is to increase the utility of resources in general, and to take into consideration and improve the technical parameters of database-access in particular. It is useful to base the broker on a standard middleware and its service - the CORBA Trader Service. This service is dealing with objects following the Yellow Pages principle.

The proposed resource-broker is the extension of the previous principle. The management of the resources makes the consideration of timing on the sides of both the exporter and the importer necessary. It is vital to introduce futures. The importers should be able to propose pending or waiting demands, the services of the exporters and the parameters should be allowed to be bound to a certain time or interval. An important task of the broker is tracking of the deals. During the completion of the deal needs, possibilities, and abilities of the parties can change (e.g. the capacity of a channel, or the performance of a server may decrease), and thus the quality parameters, in extreme cases the whole deal may be risked. In such cases the broker should try to renegotiate the deal with other participants, sometimes even with weaker quality parameters. In the case of compound service-chains an avalanche-effect could happen, and its recognition and elimination is also the task of the broker.

The resource broker would be used in the practical case for accelerating the access of multimedia databases and for improving its quality parameters. A pilot application will be developed that allows numerical evaluation of the results.

With the use of the broker developed during the project the utilisation of hardware and software resources, especially that of communication channels will be improved significantly. In the field of the pilot application, i.e. multimedia systems, the increase of speed of content-based search and the improvement of quality parameters are expected.