QoS technology for home networks

With widespread Internet technologies, and the increasing number of users owning networking devices at home, home LANs are becoming a popular utility. Home LANs may be established on two distinct layer 2 technologies, i.e., wired and wireless Ethernet, each of which has variants providing different communication modes and speeds. There appears to be a large demand in the home network area for the use of applications such as real-time communication with audio/video (AV) appliances and IP telephony, all of which require QoS. To provide QoS in a network, it is necessary to discover the network topology and available resources, e.g., the used layer 2 type, the provided communication speed, and the configured communication mode. The paper presents a mechanism for topology discovery and resource reservation, which can quickly detect network changes.