Over the past few years members of the SUMO team at Lancaster University and CNET, France Telecom have been designing and implementing a microkernel based system with facilities to support distributed real-time and multimedia applications and ODP based multimedia distributed application platforms. Such support, depending on the level of QoS commitment required, may require dedicated, per-connection, resource allocation in the CPU scheduler, virtual memory system and communication system. It may also require ongoing dynamic QoS management in all these areas.
Efficiency is a prime consideration in our work.
In particular, we are interested in minimising system imposed overheads by reducing the cost and number of system calls, context switches and copy operations. We are then underpinning the enhanced model with the SUMO real-time functionality. The open signalling work is also coordinated with the BT Labs funded Management of Multiservice Networks project of which Lancaster is a member. The project is also closely related to the QoS-A Project at Lancaster. You can find details of this, along with other projects run by the Distributed Multimedia Research Group, here .