Quality of Service in In-Home Digital Networks (EES.5653)

The aim of this project is to analyze and optimize the quality of service in in-home digital networks, addressing the issue of how to optimally use distributed processing, communication, and storage resources in such a network of embedded systems, with a focus on streaming (video, audio) applications.

In the development of in-home digital networks the concept of ubiquitous computing can be considered as an interesting long-term objective. This concept, introduced by Mark Weiser of Xerox PARC, refers to a situation in which any person, at any place, and at any time can communicate with any desired source of digital information. Two main attributes of ubiquitous computing are ubiquity, where multiple terminals cooperate in a distributed fashion, and transparency, where systems become embedded in personal life to such an extent that they become invisible.

To realize this objective in an in-home environment, and to hide the details of the system to the user, it is essential that the system's resources are managed in an automatic way. This should be done effectively, in order to fulfil the user's needs in a satisfactory way, and efficiently, in order to optimally exploit the available resources. Furthermore, robustness aspects play an important role. The envisioned results of the project include mathematical models and their analysis of in-home digital networks and their components, giving insight into the problem area, rules for configuring in-home digital networks to obtain given quality-of-service levels, algorithms for load balancing of processing and storage over the nodes in a network, for scheduling processing tasks and disk accesses, and for communication flow control in a network, and implementation of the algorithms in simulation environments and prototype systems.

The status of this project can be followed at website For results, see http://www.win.tue.nl/~johanl/projects/QoS.
One can also find the technical reports, articles and presentations there.

One company and one other university are involved in this project.