Scout is a research operating system developed at the University of Arizona.
It is communication-oriented and designed around the constraints of network-connected devices like set-top boxes.
The Scout researchers had in mind a class of devices that they called "network appliances", which include cameras and disks attached to a network.
They believed that these devices have in common the following three characteristics: To satisfy these three requirements, Scout was designed around an abstraction called a "path"; was highly configurable; and offered scheduling and resource allocation policies that provided predictable performance under load.