Dealing with wireless links in the ERA of bandwidth demanding wireless home entertainment

Wireless home entertainment is strongly emerging in the consumer market. This is happening thanks to various number of home appliances that can connect wireless to the Internet, as witnessed by the recent launch of Sony Bravia. For this reason there is an interest, in the research community, to design and develop the protocol architecture of Home Entertainment Centers (HECs). HECs are entertainment hubs capable to handle heterogeneous media, thus behaving as gateways, and to support the main multimedia services (e.g., TVs, game consoles, etc.) at home. As the interactivity of these services is crucial to guarantee a satisfactory quality of service to the end user, it is important to understand which protocols HECs have to use to exchange data and how these perform on a home wireless link. Following recent findings that confirm that TCP still occupies the lion share of Internet residential traffic, the scope of this paper is to show that among the most used and popular candidates, TCP Westwood is capable to best adapt to a home scenario that entails an increase of the bandwidth requirements and a widespread use of wireless connections.