Analysis of a quality of service framework for home area networks

The increasing diffusion of home area networks (HANs), intended for the delivery of both multimedia contents (e.g. TV programs, movies, music) and for home automation services (e.g. household appliances, lighting and surveillance controls), represents a new challenge for networking. The convergence of many traditional services over IP-based infrastructures drastically increases the amount of IP data traffic to be delivered to user clients, thus raising questions about the management of quality of service in such networks. Quality of service will be of primary importance in order to ensure right operation, and to face the occurrence of congestion conditions, due to bandwidth demanding multimedia services. In this paper, we consider two possible scenarios in which multiple multimedia and control streams are conveyed over the same HAN, and study a possible solution for the implementation of an easily manageable QoS framework, that relies on a QoS router based on open source software.