A framework for network-aware applications
Jürg Bolliger · Repository for Publications and Research Data (ETH Zurich) · 2000
Today's best-effort Internet infrastructure is well-known for its heterogeneity (both in endsystem capabilities and connectivity) and the significant fluctuations in service quality that can be observed.These two properties are often problematic from the viewpoint of a networked application, because they often result in unpredictable application behavior.Network-aware applications provide an approach to mitigate these problems: they dynamically adapt their demands to match the varying supply of network resources, e.g., with the goal to achieve predictable response times.Such network-aware applications must often trade network resources for some measure of quality of the data delivered.This dissertation puts forth the claim that dynamic adaptation is an attractive and often necessary means to achieve the goal on predictable service quality.Unfortunately, network-aware applications are notoriously difficult to construct and evaluate.Two recurring issues need to be addressed when constructing such applications: how to find out about network resource availability and dynamic changes thereof, and how to adapt application behavior (to such dynamic changes), so that a goal on the response time and the quality of the data delivered can be met.Addressing these questions the dissertation makes three main contributions.