By Carlton J. Sparrell, Ucentric Systems
Intense competition between cable and satellite is becoming the driving force for whole-home digital services such as multi-TV PVR. As service providers deploy customer premise equipment that enables new applications to reach all corners of the digital home, new approaches are required to manage this hardware to ensure ease of installation, quality of experience, and flexibility for different customers’ needs. This paper introduces a powerful architecture for managing distributed hardware resources in the networked home, and describes how a centralized resource manager and a flexible QoS enabled IP LAN can be used with advanced set-top boxes, low-cost clients, and other consumer electronic devices to deliver advanced whole-home digital services today while allowing service providers to maintain control of the consumer experience.