Multimedia QoS in consumer terminals

Over the past years, there has been a considerable amount of research in the field of QoS support for (distributed) multimedia systems, ie, multimedia processing in, for example, a (networked) workstation environment. QoS for multimedia systems is about media processing in software, using dynamically scalable functions, and trading resources for quality. Unlike QoS for mainstream multimedia systems, QoS support for high volume electronics (HVE) consumer terminals (CT), such as digital TV sets, digitally improved analog TV sets and STB (set-top boxes), has received little attention in the literature. This paper considers multimedia QoS for consumer terminals, with focus on the high-quality video domain.