Tracking application network performance in home gateways

Home gateways offer Internet connectivity for all devices in the home, allowing services such as telephony or gaming. However, typical home gateways do not include any mechanism to guarantee optimal performance when applications are competing for the same resources. In this paper we outline an application performance optimization approach for home networks. In particular we study the feasibility of application performance tracking on home gateways, which involves both identification of active applications and monitoring their performance. Our results show that although the home gateway has limited resources, it still has the capacity to do more than just forwarding packets. It can collect and export all the information needed to perform our application performance optimization.