Quality Contracts for Real-Time Enterprises

Real-time enterprises rely on user queries being answered in a timely fashion and using fresh data. This is relatively easy when systems are lightly loaded and both queries and updates can be finished quickly. However, this goal becomes fundamentally hard to achieve due to the high volume of queries and updates in real systems, especially in periods of flash crowds. In such cases, systems typically try to optimize for the average case, treating all users, queries, and data equally. In this paper, we argue that it is more beneficial for real-time enterprises to have the users specify how to balance such a tradeoff between Quality of Service (QoS) and Quality of Data (QoD), in other words, "instructing" the system on how to best allocate resources to maximize the overall user satisfaction. Specifically, we propose Quality Contracts (QC) which is a framework based on the micro-economic paradigm and provides an intuitive and easy to use, yet very powerful way for users to specify...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: BIRTE
• Authors: Alexandros Labrinidis, Huiming Qu, Jie Xu
• Keywords: BIRTE 2006, Business, Overall User Satisfaction, Real-time Enterprises, User Queries