Preventing network performance interference with ACK-separation queuing mechanism in a home network gateway using an asymmetric link

In network-enabled consumer electronics development, much of the time and effort is spent analyzing and solving network performance problems. In this paper, we define an instance of such problems discovered while developing a commercial home network gateway. We then analyze its cause and propose a solution mechanism. Our home network gateway uses an asymmetric link (ADSL) and suffers from an undesirable phenomenon where downlink traffic interferes with upload speed. We call this phenomenon the network performance interference problem. While this problem can easily be confused with receive livelock caused by packet contention at the input queue, we find that this is not the case. By performing extensive experiments and analysis, we reveal that our problem is caused by packet contention at the output queue and certain intrinsic characteristics of TCP. We devise an ACK-separation queuing mechanism for this problem and implement it in the home network gateway. Our experiments show that it effectively solves the problem.