A negotiation protocol with conditional offers for camera handoffs.

Abstract

This thesis explores the idea of conditional offers during camera handoff negotiations. In a departure from contract-net inspired negotiation models that have been proposed for camera handoffs, the current scheme assumes that each camera maintains the state of its neighbouring cameras. To this end, we develop a new short-term memory model for maintaining a camera’s own state and the state of its neighbouring cameras. The fact that each camera is aware of its surrounding cameras is exploited to generate conditional offers during handoff negotiations. This can result in multiple rounds of negotiations during a single handoff, leading to successful handoffs in situations where one of the cameras that is being asked to take on one more task is unable to take on a new task without relinquishing an existing task. The results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed negotiation model over existing models for camera handoffs.