A smart access point solution for heterogeneous flows

Computer-centered services and broadband wireless connectivity are enabling the delivery of multimedia-based entertainment from the Internet to in-house wireless devices and appliances. In this context, rich-media applications can be supported by different protocols that must share the same channel without affecting each other performances. Instead, with current 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. In addition, elastic applications may also unfairly damage each other when featured with different round-trip times (RTTs) between clients and servers, even if sharing the same bottleneck. In this article we provide insight on these problems and show how a solution based on a smart access point may actually solve them, allowing a fair coexistence between heterogeneous flows, even when featured with different transport protocols and different RTTs.