Hammerstein-Wiener nonlinear model based predictive control for relative QoS performance and resource management of software systems

Runtime management of Quality of Service (QoS) performance and resource provisioning is a vital issue in shared resource software environments. A useful performance management technique for such software systems is the relative guarantee feedback control scheme. The existing approaches for this class of control systems are mainly based on off-line linear or on-line model identification and control techniques, which tend to have performance issues in the presence of nonlinearities induced by this scheme. Instead of using such modeling techniques, this paper proposes a new approach for QoS performance management and resource provisioning by using an off-line identification of Hammerstein and Wiener nonlinear block structural model. Using the characteristic structure of the nonlinear model, a predictive feedback controller based on a gain schedule technique is incorporated in the design to achieve the performance objectives. The proposed approach is validated using experiments based on a prototype, demonstrating superior runtime QoS performance management and resource provisioning in a complex software system.