Quality of service in in-home digital networks : smoothing streams for optimal bus and buffer usage

In an in-home digital network it may be expected that several data (audio, video) streams run simultaneously over a shared communication device, e.g. a bus. The burstiness a data stream can have can be reduced by buffering data at the sending and receiving node connected to the bus, thereby allowing a lower bus bandwidth allocation for the stream. In this paper we present an algorithm that determines how much bandwidth and buffer space should be allocated to each stream. We model the problem as a linear program and apply a Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition to decompose the multiple-stream problem into several single-stream problems. For these single-stream problems we present sketches of efficient algorithms to solve them.