International Business Machines Corporation

Electrolux Appliances Aktiebolag

Lukas Kencl

Patrick Droz

Roman Alexander Pletka

Clark Debs Jeffries

Andreas Kind

Soenke V Mannal

Kurt Reul

Hoyt Edwin Bowen, Jr

Petr Tahal

Andreas Folkesson

A method of controlling a home appliance connected to the Internet via a gateway and an appliance control server of an appliance control cloud. The appliance executes control commands for operating the appliance received from the Internet via the gateway only if the commands are received from the appliance control cloud. A control command supply server of a control command supply cloud is connected to the home appliance control cloud via the Internet, and has at least one repository storing control instruction sets to operate the appliance. The method includes authenticating a request for remote control of the appliance received from the control command supply server via the Internet, and, responsive to positive authentication, forwarding control commands from the control command supply server to the appliance. The control commands are part of a set of instructions from the repository selected based on input received by a user terminal device.

Method of controlling a home appliance and control system

Methods and apparatus are provided for controlling flow rates of a plurality of data packet flows into a queuecorresponding to a resourceof a network device. The flows comprise a setof non-responsive flows, and a setof other flows which may comprise responsive flows and/or flows whose responsiveness is unknown. The flow rates are managed in accordance with a queue management scheme such that adjustments are made to each flow rate in dependence on excess bandwidth in the resource, the amounts of the adjustments being dependent on one or more adjustment parameters for each flow. An error signal is generated based on the deviation from a desired allocation ratio of the ratio of the total flow rates into the queuefor the sets of flows. At least one adjustment parameter for at least one flow is then varied in dependence on the error signal in such a manner as to reduce the aforementioned deviation. A closed-loop control scheme thus operates in conjunction with the underlying queue management scheme to promote fair bandwidth allocation even in the presence of a mix of responsive and non-responsive flows.

Flow control in network devices

The present invention provides an improved method and a system for processing data packets in a router. The router includes a plurality of input/output ports and more than one packet processing units. The packet processing units derive from a piece of information associated to each data packet one output port to forward the data packet to. In response to a data packet arriving at one input port one packet processing unit is determined. The determined packet processing unit is then requested to derive a respective output port. The output port is derived from a piece of information within the packet. An identification identifying the respective output port is in the following returned to the requesting unit. Finally, the data packet is forwarded to the identified output port. The method and system according to the present invention optimize advantageously resource utilization that leads to higher packet processing speed and helps to lower the costs and power requirements. Furthermore, it leads to increased fault tolerance, i.e. increased reliability.

Method and system for processing data packets

Growing community of inventors

Prague, Czechia

Lukas Kencl