Patent Application
20100005170
The present application relates generally to mapping human-meaningful parameters to network-meaningful parameters to permit a user to establish traffic importance in home networks.
As networking and digital media technologies advance, network-enabled consumer electronic devices have been introduced that can store, manage, and/or playback different types of digital media content. For example, all of a user's digital music, video and photos may be stored on a network storage device, and a digital media player used to render all the content on the HDTV in a user's living room.
Because a network might not have sufficient bandwidth to carry all demanded traffic simultaneously, data may be prioritized using information in the data packets including, for example, destination IP address with subnet mask, originating IP address with subnet mask, source media access control (MAC) address, destination MAC address, protocol, source/destination port, and other network-meaningful parameters. As understood herein, however, these parameters are not necessarily meaningful to non-technical users, who may wish to define what traffic is more important to the user and what traffic is less important in terms of e.g., network devices that the user considers to be more important at particular times of day. Furthermore, it is possible that identical classifications for data can be generated based upon network-meaningful parameters, diminishing the value to the user of the quality of experience provided to the user.
The details of non-limiting embodiments, both as to its structure and operation, can best be understood in reference to the accompanying drawings, in which like reference numerals refer to like parts, and in which:
Overview
Accordingly, the present invention recognizes the desirability to provide for human friendly rules for establishing home network traffic policy so that the network has the ability to appropriately classify, prioritize, and perform admission control.
A method in accordance with the above includes establishing relationships between home network parameters and abstractions of the home network parameters. As set forth further below, the abstractions may be human-meaningful terms that are displayed (e.g., visibly or audibly) so that a user is permitted to establish data traffic importances in a home network using the abstractions. The data traffic importances are implemented using the home network parameters. In specific embodiments, this is done in part by mapping the human-meaningful terms to respective network parameters.
For example, a human-meaningful term can be a user-established device name and a respective network parameter corresponding to the user-established device name can be a destination address. Or, a human-meaningful term can be a manufacturer-established device model designation and a respective network parameter corresponding to the model designation can be a destination address. Yet again, a human-meaningful term can be a device capability (such as “high definition display device”) and a respective network parameter corresponding to the device capability may be a protocol type.
In another example, an apparatus can include a processor and a computer-readable medium accessible to the processor and bearing mapping between network parameters and human-meaningful terms in a home network. The network parameters are useful by a computer to convey data traffic in the home network, while the human-meaningful terms are useful for presenting a user interface to a person.
In another example, a residential gateway (RG) is configured to establish communication between a wide area network and a home network. The RG includes a processor and a tangible computer-readable medium accessible to the processor and bearing a data structure correlating terms that are meaningful to a human to respective network parameters to implement user-defined traffic importance in the home network.
Referring initially to
By way of non-limiting example, the CE devices of the home network 10 may include game console 20 with video display 22, processor 24, and computer-readable medium 26. The home network 10 may also include a digital video recorder (DVR) 28 that in some embodiments may include a video display 30, processor 32, and computer-readable medium 34. The home network 10 may also include a personal video recorder (PVR) 36 that in some embodiments may include a video display 38, processor 40, and computer-readable medium 42. Further, the home network 10 may include a server computer 44 that includes a processor 46 and computer-readable medium 48. A TV 50 may also be included in the network 10, and the TV 50 typically includes, among TV components such as a tuner 51, a TV display 52, TV processor 54, and computer readable medium 56. The TV 50 may be controlled using a remote control 58. A DVD player 60 may also be on the network and can include a processor 62 and computer readable medium 64.
The logic described herein may be stored in the form of computer-readable code on any one or more of the above-described computer readable media for execution by any one or more of the above-described processors. In one embodiment the logic is implemented by the RG 12. In any case, the computer-readable media may be, without limitation, disk drives, solid state memory, etc.
The overall logic may be seen in reference to
At block 70, a user interface (UI) such as the example described further below in reference to
The above-described mapping is shown in greater detail at blocks 72 and 74 of
In a general sense, in human-meaningful terms, the following sentence can be mapped to network parameters as follows: (someone/some thing/some place) wants to execute (a function) with (some device) at (some time). (Someone/some thing/some place) is a human-meaningful term that maps to the network parameter(s) of destination device address and/or port of the CE device sought to be viewed (such as the TV 50, game console 20, etc.), whereas (function) maps to an action such as “play”, “record”, etc. (Some device) is a human-meaningful term that maps to the network parameter(s) of source device address and/or port of the source device (e.g., the server 44 or DVR 28 or PVR 36 or DVD player 60) that holds the content (audio, video, photographs, etc.) that is desired. (Some device) may also map to a protocol type.
Turning to
An example non-limiting UI is shown at 82 in
If desired, the UI 82 may include a descriptor window 84 that sets forth information about the currently-highlighted device, e.g., brand name, model name, and device description as might be discovered using network discovery principles known in the art. In any case, the user can navigate a screen cursor by means of, e.g., the remote control 58 to select a device, and then operate a “move up” button 86 to move the device up in the list, effectively increasing its importance. A “move down” 88 can also be selected to move the device down in the list to decrease its importance. Traffic is prioritized on the network according to the user-defined importances.
If desired, policies may be implemented to assign importance-ranked traffic to queues. For example, an egress traffic queue may be established with multiple levels. An intermediate queue may be established between the traffic source(s) and egress queue, and the intermediate queue can have a greater number of levels than the egress queue. To simplify the explanation, it can be assumed that two levels of intermediate queues are established per level of egress queue.
A scheduler, which may be implemented by the RG or by any other network device such as a router that can understand the mappings and implement scheduling per the importances, may be established between the intermediate queue and the egress queue that can service (or forward) each priority level of the intermediate queue in a weighted fashion. Then, it may be assumed that the higher priority levels of the intermediate queue carry “important” traffic. Using the simplified assumption, if the egress queue has four levels (such as, for instance, voice, video, best effort, background) then the intermediate queue would have eight levels that may be assigned into four queue pairs, with each pair corresponding to a given category in the egress queue. Traffic of a particular type that is designated as “important” is assigned to the upper queue in each pair (and is considered admitted)—while less important traffic can be assigned to the lower queue in each pair (and is considered non-admitted).
Accordingly, human-meaningful terms including user identity, device type, device capabilities, device configuration, device location, stream function (e.g., record, live pay for view, pay per view (play remotely stored), playback (play locally stored), content type (audio, video, etc.), and time of day can be mapped to network parameters and used to establish policy and thus assist classification and admission control for home networking quality of service.
While the particular MAPPING HUMAN-MEANINGFUL PARAMETERS TO NETWORK-MEANINGFUL PARAMETERS TO PERMIT USER TO ESTABLISH TRAFFIC IMPORTANCE IN HOME NETWORK is herein shown and described in detail, it is to be understood that the subject matter which is encompassed by the present invention is limited only by the claims.
