Small Office Home Office Research Articles

Load Leveling and Energy-Saving Effects Evaluation of SOHO

abstract“The California energy crisis of 2000,” like a bomb exploding in a crowd, alerted the world to the issues surrounding safe and secure energy supply. Increasing energy demand calls for an expanding supply system in order to realize a stable supply of energy. On the other hand, environmental problems such as global warming, the heat island phenomenon, resource depletion, and so on, call for a more efficient and energy-saving supply system. With these as a background, load leveling, one of the effects of DSM (Demand Side Management), is considered to be an effective method.In this paper, 24-hour investigations on SOHO (Small Office Home Office), residential buildings and offices were conducted in the central Tokyo area. Based on the results, the monthly and hourly energy consumption characteristics of SOHO were ascertained. In addition, the dimensionless parameters, load leveling ratio rl and energy saving rate rs were defined. Using rl, SOHO was proven to have profound effects on load leveling; and using rs, the energy saving potential was evaluated quantitatively.

A characterization of broadband user behavior and their e-business activities

This paper presents a characterization of broadband user behavior from an Internet Service Provider standpoint. Users are broken into two major categories: residential and Small-Office/Home-Office (SOHO). For each user category, the characterization is performed along four criteria: (i) session arrival process, (ii) session duration, (iii) number of bytes transferred within a session and (iv) user request patterns.Our results show that both residential and SOHO session inter-arrival times are exponentially distributed. Whereas residential session arrival rates remain relatively high during the day, SOHO session arrival rates vary much more significantly during the day. On the other hand, a typical SOHO user session is longer and transfers a larger volume of data. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers two main groups of session request patterns within each user category. The first group consists of user sessions that use traditional Internet services, such as e-mail, instant messenger and, mostly, www services. On the other hand, sessions from the second group, a smaller group, use typically peer-to-peer file sharing applications, remain active for longer periods and transfer a large amount of data. Looking further into the e-business services most commonly accessed, we found that subscription-based and advertising services account for the vast majority of user HTTP requests in both residential and SOHO workloads. Understanding these user behavior patterns is important to the development of more efficient applications for broadband users.

Standards for service discovery and delivery

For the past five years, competing industries and standards developers have been hotly pursuing automatic configuration, now coined the broader term service discovery. Jini, Universal Plug and Play (UPnP), Salutation, and Service Location Protocol are among the front-runners in this new race. However, choosing service discovery as the topic of the hour goes beyond the need for plug-and-play solutions or support for the SOHO (small office/home office) user. Service discovery's potential in mobile and pervasive computing environments motivated my choice.

A Dynamic IT Adoption Model for the SOHO Market: PC Generational Decisions with Technological Expectations

The small-office/home-office (SOHO) professionals comprise the fastest growing segment in the labor force today. Typically being a one-person business based at home, SOHO owners mostly rely on office information technology to single handedly run their entire operation. Despite the segment's ostensibly growing dependence and influence on the information technology (IT) industry, still very little is known about the dynamics between SOHO and IT products. With the purpose of addressing this void, we investigate the SOHO professionals' adoption patterns of multigenerational IT products. Accordingly, we develop and empirically estimate an individual SOHO-level initial- and repeat-purchase logit model that captures the procurement patterns for successive generations of technological products, namely the PC category. Specifically, we find that SOHO professionals' procurement choices are influenced by a number of salient dimensions (i.e., income, performance, price, interpurchase time, network externalities). Furthermore, some SOHO owners are found to have a preference for a future (expected) generation (over a currently available one), which is explained via their business dispositions (i.e., technology orientation, result orientation, search orientation) toward accepting technological incertitude.

Photo Imaging with Ink Jet Inks

Both dye-based and pigment-based aqueous ink jet inks are capable of providing excellent photo quality in the current generation of low drop volume high resolution small office home office (SOHO) ink jet printers, especially when printed on special coated glossy ink jet photo papers. However, no one system delivers the perfect balance of color, image quality, physical durability, glossy uniformity, and image permanence.The primary factors causing color fade and loss of image permanence in dye-based ink jet inks are environmental conditions such as light, heat, air quality, and humidity. Dye inks printed on microporous photo media undergo color fade much more rapidly than on polymeric nonporous coated photo media, with a significant color changed observed sometimes in a matter of weeks.When image permanence is required for photo printing, pigment-based ink jet inks are the choice. One of the remaining image quality issues with pigment inks is nonuniform gloss. For photographic and other high definition imaging, uniform high gloss is desirable to enhance the perception of clarity and sharpness of the image. When a significant difference in gloss occurs between inked and unprinted areas (media), the image appears to have “flat”, non-shiny areas in the photo print. In our studies of gloss uniformity, we found nonuniform gloss also can occur with dye-based ink jet inks printed on glossy media.This paper will summarize our studies of gloss as function of ink formulation parameters: colorant (pigment or dye), dispersant type/dispersion process (pigment), vehicle (co-solvents, surfactants) and water. This gloss study included a variety of glossy media types. Additionally, the color gamut of current pigment inks printed on glossy photo papers will be reviewed.

SDSL — it is more than just a simple voice/web access

SDSL (Symmetrical Digital Subscriber Line) is a future-proof wideband access technology for small business and residential users via twisted pair. The original motive for development of new xDSL technologies was the desire on faster Internet access for classic telephone users via copper line. Especially the development of SDSL with its symmetrical nature presents new possibilities itself. For instance SDSL copes excellently with the growing demand for carrying several voice connections via a single copper line always called VoDSL (Voice over DSL), the new generation of voice services for small enterprises and the small office/home office (SOHO) market. We will summarize the features of SDSL and its implementation and have a short look at the actual standardization items. Different Voice over DSL approaches and the use of SDSL as in-house installation will be discussed.

A Study of Home Automation towards Small-Office Home-Office

A Study of Home Automation towards Small-Office Home-Office

Remote connection to the Kyushu University Medical Center LAN using digital and analog telephone lines.

SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) has recently become popular, as it makes working at home possible. Computers or Local Area Networks(LAN) connected to the office network from home are necessary for the implementation of this concept. Kyushu University has begun a service connecting home computers to the campus LAN for researchers, staff and students of the Faculty of Medicine. We have two different telephone connection methods. One connects the campus LAN and the home computer LAN using routers through the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN). The other connects computers at home to the workstation in the university, using modems and the PPP (Point to Point Protocol) through a public telephone analog line. This paper outlines our university SOHO connection system and discusses the merits and demerits of using telephone line connections.