A QoS-aware residential gateway with bandwidth management

The residential gateway (RG) is the core device of the digital home network. The RG translates communication protocols, coordinates information sharing and serves as a gateway to external networks for integrated multimedia entertainment, on-line services, home security, home automation, information exchange and data storage. Modern home network applications especially for real-time are demanding guaranteed quality of service (QoS) for bounded network bandwidth resources. In order to initiate a DiffServ-QoS (differentiated services-QoS) bandwidth management mechanism during network congestion, this paper proposes a QRG (QoS-aware residential gateway) with both real-time traffic monitoring, DiffServ-QoS and CBQ bandwidth management. Firstly, QRG classifies traffic flow into separate types, with specialized treatment per traffic type to optimize compliance with user-specified priorities. Applications with higher priority get the right to deliver first. Additionally, QRG with built-in traffic control function adopts class based queuing (CBQ) as DiffServ-QoS bandwidth/traffic management for optimized use of bounded network resources. QRG is experimentally implemented on a Linux platform. High-end application is simulated by hosting QRG in a general-purpose PC, while minimum-cost modular application is simulated by hosting QRG in a light-weight low-power ARM920T embedded system. Results show that in both implementations, QRG successfully performs DiffServ-QoS and CBQ bandwidth management functions so that good quality of service and video performance are maintained during network congestion.