Summary: | Distributed applications concurrently share and compete for resources in heterogeneous systems. The objective of the Management System for Heterogeneous Networks (MSHN) is to use admission control, smart scheduling, and adaptation awareness in applications to successfully cope with the dynamics of resource availability. MSHN therefore requires knowledge of the expected resource utilization of applications that execute within the MSHN environment and the current state of these resources. MSHN relies on the above information to correctly identify resources to be assigned to these applications. This thesis investigates the capabilities of currently available communication resource status monitoring tools for the purpose of identifying those tools that, with low overhead, can provide accurate, end-to-end communication status information in a Windows NT environment. The techniques used by the various tools are described and the methods for determining the accuracy of these tools are specified. Results of the experiments with the various tools show that they add between 2% - 3% overhead in most cases and as much as 10% overhead in the worst case. Finally, none of the existing commercial tools studied gave an accurate assessment of the end-to-end communication throughput and latency for Windows NT 4.0
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