Recent publications - CITR Project on "Quality of service and distributed systems management"

Service management issues in electronic commerce applications

• Authors: G. v. Bochmann, B. Kerhervé and M. Mohamed-Salem
• Reference : [Boch 99a] in Electronic Commerce Technology Trends: Challenges and Opportunities, W.Kou and Y. Yesha (eds), IBM Press, 2000, pp. 227-238.
• Abstract: Quality of service issues have first been discussed in relation with the performance of communication networks. However, for understanding end-to-end performance of a distributed system, it is important to also consider the performance at the application level, of the different components of the distributed application, as well as the quality of service view of the user. Most work on quality of service management at the application level has been done for applications involving access to distributed multimedia databases, such as video-on-demand. The same QoS issues apply also to electronic commerce when users access a catalog which may include multimedia information in addition to the hard-core data elements, such as name and price of the product. In this paper, we identify various issues related to quality of service management for electronic commerce applications, and concentrate on one of these, namely the selection of a server from a pool of servers in order to optimize the overall cost-performance of the system and the user's satisfaction. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews QoS specification, its categories and dimensions in distributed systems. In section 3 we look at the QoS issues (QoS specification and provision) in the specific context of electronic commerce. Section 4 describes a scalable architecture for QoS management for the electronic commerce applications.
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Introducing QoS into electronic commerce applications

• Authors: G. v. Bochmann, B. Kerhervé, H. Lutfiyya, M. Salem and H. Ye
• Reference : [Boch 01a] Proc. of Second International Symposium on Electronic Commerce, April 2001, Hong Kong, China, published as "Electronic Commerce Technologies", LNCS 2004, Springer Verlag, pp. 138-147.
• Abstract: Business to consumer is expected to be one of the fastest growing segments of electronic commerce. One important and challenging problem in such context, is the satisfaction of user expectations about the Quality of Service (QoS) provided when applications are deployed on a large scale. In this paper, we will examine the use of dynamic QoS management techniques in combination with replication at the various architectural levels of an electronic commerce application.
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Modeling and analysis of cooperative QoS management

• Authors: L. Mekouar, S. Fischer, A. Hafid and G. v. Bochmann
• Reference: [Meko 00a] Interoperable Communication Networks, Special Issue on Interop. Multimedia Networks, to be published in 2000.
• Abstract:
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Quality of service aware distributed query processing

• Authors: H. Ye, B. Kerhervé and G. v. Bochmann
• Reference : [Ye 99a] DEXA Workshop on Query Processing in Multimedia Information Systems (QPMIDS), 10th Intern. Workshop on Database & Expert Systems Applications, Florence, Italy, 1-3 Sept. 1999, Proc. published by IEEE Computer Society, 1999
• Abstract: In the environment of wide-area networks such as the Internet, distributed query processing becomes problematic due to the changing coming from both underlying networks and user's requirements. In this new context, conventional query processing strategies with the homogeneous assumption will not work well, because they are unable to adapt to unexpected changes in the performance of the communication networks. In this paper, we address the issue of how to make distributed query processing be aware of these changes. We introduce the idea of integration distributed query processing with Quality of Service (QoS) management and accordingly illustrate our view of QoS-aware distributed query processing.
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