Ensuring fair coexistence of multimedia applications in a wireless home

Nowadays, wireless connectivity is increasingly available in homes to support heterogeneous multimedia applications. However, with current off-the-shelf systems, real-time applications (e.g., video streaming, online games) suffer from delays caused by the interference with elastic (e.g., TCP-based downloading sessions) ones. Furthermore, simultaneous elastic application flows are not able to fairly share the same bottleneck, severely damaging those featured with long round-trip times (RTTs). In this article, we discuss how a solution based on a smart access point can actually solve these problems, ensuring low per-packet delays to real-time applications and both high and RTT-fair throughput to elastic ones. We discuss the experimental outcome of our solution showing the benefits achieved with respect to using the legacy protocols and even to adopting a TCP Vegas-based solution, known for providing the same goals we are aiming at.