QoSiLAN - A Heterogeneous Approach to Quality of Service in Local Area Networks

Since most real-time audio and video applications lack Quality of Service (QoS) support and QoS-aware networkhardware is not common in consumer grade networks, theQuality of Experience (QoE) of, for example, high definitionInternet Protocol Television (IPTV) is very limited. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel approach for enabling QoS in unmanaged, heterogeneous Local Area Networks (LAN) across access technologies. To support QoS in LANs, especially in the home’s environment, the QoSiLAN system enables selforganised QoS, implemented in the hosts, rather than modify the protocol stack. In contrast, traditional solutions rely on network support by switches, access points or routers. Perlink resource reservation and prioritisation are achieved by knowledge of the topology map and by reducing the bandwidth of disturbing best effort traffic caused by other communicating hosts. Since QoSiLAN follows a layer 3 QoS model, it qualifies for LANs with mixed access technologies.