Available Bandwidth Probing for path selection in heterogeneous home Networks

The time-varying capacity links, such as wireless links and power line communication (PLC) links, which are integrated to emergent connectivity devices of Home Networks (HNs) require QoS mechanisms to protect sensitive and critical HN flows. In this paper, we couple the “Iperf in lightweight TCP mode” probing technique (developed in a previous work to estimate available bandwidth) with the path selection procedure of the “Inter-MAC” software (which was derived from the European OMEGA project, to handle heterogeneous HN technologies). As we have shown in our previous work, the lightweight TCP Iperf probing is accurate over time-varying capacity links. On the contrary, the Inter-MAC default implementation biases the measurements, because it computes the available bandwidth by subtracting the bit counters of local home network interfaces from their correspondent physical capacities, which are supposed constants. We show that coupling our lightweight TCP Iperf technique with the Inter-MAC software is really convenient to avoid performance blind spots on HN paths. Additionally, we show a realistic use case on test bed with HN extenders based on WiFi/PLC dual-links. We show the possibility of efficiently protecting sensitive IPTV flows and enhancing the link utilization, when the PLC/WiFi links capacities are strongly degraded.