An Architectural Model to Provide QoS in a Home Network and its Evaluation in a Real Testbed

Abstract

Home networks are an evolution of office local area networks, answering the need for residential distribution of broadband services. The design of a home network must strive to keep low costs, easy installation and maintenance while at the same time providing a large variety of services, from voice and data applications to multimedia streaming. A successful platform for home networking must put together simple interfaces for the users and sophisticated mechanisms for managing the distribution of the desired broadband services. In this paper we propose mechanisms to support flows with different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements in a home network whose architectural model has been defined in the framework of the European IST ePerSpace project. The model is based on a centralized Residential Gateway (RG), which connects and coordinates different network technologies to support home services. The proposed mechanisms are simple to be implemented since they can be installed on top of existing home network technologies, without modifying them. We implement the whole model and our mechanisms in a real testbed and we perform an extensive performance evaluation over it. The performance evaluation allows us to understand the effect of different settings both on the wired and on the wireless interfaces of the RG, to comprehend which are the key aspects that influence the overall performance and to propose some RG configurations which turn out to be very effective in achieving the desired performance. Special attention is devoted to the wireless support of home services on IEEE 802.11b devices.