Evaluating “no-new-wires” home networks

Emerging broadband entertainment applications such as IPTV (Internet protocol television) and whole-house PVR (personal video recorder) bring new challenges to existing home networks. Gigabit Ethernet is an obvious choice, but consumers are still reluctant due to the need for rewiring in most dwellings. Several ldquono-new-wiresrdquo technologies have been proposed in recent years, but there is little work on how to distribute IPTV, VoIP (voice over IP) and data traffic together effectively and efficiently in a household environment. In this paper, we propose a wireless/wired-hybrid, multi-link structure for broadband home networks, and investigate its feasibility and performance through a multimedia over multi-link testbed. Our measurement study shows that the proposed multi-link structure can improve the performance, reliability and availability of home networks considerably, indicating that it is an attractive approach to multimedia in-home distribution. In addition, the paper also discusses the challenges and approaches in further improving the performance of heterogeneous, multi-link home networks.