Traffic monitoring in home networks: Enhancing diagnosis and performance tracking

Home network complexity is dramatically growing in terms of topology (devices and connectivity technologies) and services leading to increasingly challenging management issues. In this context, enabling a better visibility of home network traffic usage and performance is a crucial step to provide efficient self-care and customer care. In this paper, we study home network traffic monitoring architectural approaches. In particular, we study the feasibility of a Home Gateway based flow monitoring approach, which will allow enhancing home network diagnostic and performance tracking. Our experimental evaluation aims at providing a better understanding of deployment possibilities and limits. The obtained experimental results, based on an open source tool, are promising in terms of resource consumption (an average load of 6,6% and 18MB for CPU and memory respectively ) as well as bandwidth utilization (average 156 Kbps) for typical DSL access speed scenario.