Copyright by Vijay Kumar Devatha 2003

Abstract:  Applications and systems are today becoming increasingly demanding in terms of resources. While an isolated machine or workstation normally imposes a restrictive ceiling on the resources available to a process, a distributed computational grid can act as a virtual machine capable of hitherto unimagined processing power. To that end, the objective of the research in this thesis is to build an extension to the Dynamic Soft Realtime Scheduler for Windows NT (DSRT/NT) that will allow for the accommodation of remote real-time requests. The major contributions of this work are: (1) Introducing a broker to handle remote requests (2) Establishing a directory-based service for selecting one of many server nodes (3) Providing APIs for ensuring some minimal QoS guarantees. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the extended DSRT/NT in providing remote multimedia applications with soft real-time services at a considerably small cost of overhead.