Analyzing the Digital Home´s Quality of Service

Digital Home (DH) offers a lot of business opportunities. Therefore, DH is a place to be for industrialists such as Telecommunications Operators, Services Providers, Network, Devices and Consumer Electronics Manufacturers. DH raises many challenges about, among others, Management (i.e., Configuration and Deployment, Healing, Protection, and Optimization), Quality of Service (QoS), Home Automation, Opening to third-party services, and Green attitude. The work presented here focuses on the QoS challenge. It is conducted in a research project that focuses on the QoS maintenance of services offered to end-users via their DH. QoS maintenance requires QoS monitoring and analyzing mechanisms. As a consequence, we propose a QoS Monitoring and Analyzing enabler that uses the Service Level Checking approach (SLC) to analyze the DH´s QoS with regard to services contracts (i.e., Service Level Agreement: SLA). SLC refers to issues and solutions related to the services compliance analyzing/checking w.r.t. their SLA. SLC takes as input monitoring information related to the services, and SLA contractualizing the services, it then analyzes these inputs and produces results about the services´ compliance. In the DH context, a service can be an end-user or a software service, a network link, or a device. This paper presents our solution, named SLC4DH, which has been implemented and validated in our research project.