When Ambient Intelligence meets the Internet: User Module framework and its applications

Advances in Ambient Intelligence (AmI) technologies, when combined with user-centric computing, present major opportunities for building new communication pathways between end-users and traditional computer networks. We propose to explicitly take the end-user into account by defining a new functional module called the User Module across the layers of the Internet protocol stack. This new User Module empowers end-users to improve network performance and enhance the end-user Quality of Experience (QoE) based on their interaction activities. To successfully capture the significant interaction information of end-users, we leverage on the well-established Human Information Processing approach to build the end-user model. Subsequently, we present two exemplary User Module applications addressing the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), respectively. Both applications illustrate how the User Module operates to effectively improve the underlying network performance and eventually enhance the end-user QoE.