An Architecture for a QoS-Aware Application Integration Middleware

Complex application integration scenarios often demand for different combinations of qualities of services (QoS) at middleware level. The scenario presented in the paper, for instance, requires transactional middleware behaviour for business negotiations between a relatively small number of participants on the one hand, while on the other hand it requires high scalability for distributing data to a large number of clients. The concept of Triple Space, a semantically enhanced, distributed tuplespace middleware based on an extended Linda model, has been developed to provide such an infrastructure. In contrast to existing middleware infrastructures, Triple Space supports a set of configurations which define the system's QoS. In this paper, we present a motivating use case scenario, deduce requirements for the architecture of Triple Space, define its architecture and three QoS configurations, and outline our approach towards implementing a highly scalable distributed communication infrastructure.