<title>Quality-of-service guarantees using positioning information in a wireless distributed environment</title>

Abstract

This paper describes a system to support a wireless vision platform moving within a large space spanned by multiple wireless cells. The system offers a cost effective and scalable design for a distributed active vision system consisting of mobile cameras, a compute cluster of high performance workstations interconnected by a high bandwidth network, and a wireless network divided into distinct cells that connects mobile platforms with the computing cluster. Position information available at the mobile platforms [e.g., via the NAVSTAR global positioning (GPS) system] together with our 'position-aware' division algorithms, and routing protocol ensures continuous quality-of-service (QoS) as the mobile platforms move from cell to cell. This paper extends a real-time QoS communication protocol developed in our earlier work to provide continuous quality of service. We also present vision algorithms that minimize the hardware needed on the mobile platforms using the GPS position information and by off-loading computation to the compute cluster.