Admission Control and Drop strategies in a UPnP-QoS controlled home network

The spread of novel multimedia services such as audio and video streaming, HDTV and online gaming have become a ordinary in the home networks. Therefore, the possibility to manage the Quality of Service (QoS) within an home environment becomes a crucial factor for the satisfaction of the user. In this paper we propose an enhanced Admission Control and Drop strategies for a UPnP-QoS controlled home network to guarantee QoS for multiple concurrent services. The UPnP-QoS architecture works well in the case of moderate traffic loads, but may fail whenever the network becomes overloaded. The paper demonstrates how the combined use of the proposed admission control and drop solutions with the UPnP-QoS framework avoids network congestion and guarantees QoS to all the admitted traffic streams. A proof of concept Java implementation has been developed to demonstrate the expected results in a real home environment.