Network services via reflective architecture

An application to be adaptive needs to know the QoS features concerning the underlying system objects. MAIS (Multichannel Adaptive Information Systems) core architecture provides via meta-objects, called Reflective Objects, the visibility of the QoS-related aspects of the underlying architecture. The local knowledge is termed Reflective Knowledge. The problem rises in a distributed environment since an application exploits local Reflective Objects, which model remote system objects. Applications must be aware that they rely on a reflective knowledge that may be not updated. The MAIS extended architecture allows the peers to be aware of themselves (exploiting Reflective Knowledge) and of the remote peers - with related communication channels - exploiting Reflective Guess. The focus of the MAIS extended architecture concerns the network model that raises at the application level the network QoS features. In this view, the network Reflective Objects form the Reflective Guess of the peers.