| Advances in networking, communication, storage, computing, and multimedia technologies coupled with the emerging application areas is fueling the merger of computing and communication systems. This will result in a global information infrastructure of the size and magnitude erstwhile unimaginable. Such an infrastructure will have numerous services and hundreds of thousands of subscribers. A key issue in developing a global information infrastructure is that of effective management and utilization of resources. Increasingly, applications require delivery of multifaceted digital information services with stringent requirements on the delivery of information. For instance, multimedia applications have QoS (Quality of Service) parameters that define the extent to which performance specifications such as responsiveness, reliability, availability, security and cost-effectiveness may be violated. Varying requirements posed by applications, customers, and service providers makes the task of resource management in the evolving global information infrastructure a challenging research problem---one with significant commercial impact as well.;In this thesis, we present a new paradigm for developing safe, customizable middleware for the global information infrastructure. The composition of multiple resource management services is necessary to guarantee safe, cost-effective QoS in such an infrastructure, which by its very nature is open and distributed. We specify core resource management services---remote creation, distributed snapshot and directory services that can be used as a basis for more complex activities. The thesis develops mathematical frameworks and formal mechanisms for reasoning about the interaction and composition of resource management activities in open distributed systems, their dynamic installation and modification. In particular, we develop a two-level meta-architectural model of distributed computation based on actors. This enables us to consider separately issues such as: functional behavior of an application; and resource management issues such as storage management, load balancing, QoS specification and enforcement. The utility of this approach is illustrated by developing QoS based resource management techniques for distributed multimedia systems and reasoning about them. |
