Content-aware automatic QoS provisioning for UPnP AV-based multimedia services over wireless LANs

Abstract

With the advent of wireless and mobile devices, wireless communications technology is enjoying its fastest growth period in history. It has been greatly affecting the way we live and work. Two main challenges remain that prevent the wide-spread adoption of digital media distribution using wireless technology such as IEEE 802.11 Wi-fi LANs at home are plug-and-play (zero-configuration) and Quality of Service (QoS). The UPnP AV (audio/video) technology is an emerging multimedia session initiation/control protocol promoted by Intel and Microsoft for multimedia content delivery services in home networks. In this paper, we propose a new scheme to address the above two issues. By performing Layer-7 content classification, inspection and automatic resource allocation and configuration, the scheme provides transparent QoS guarantees to UPnP AV multimedia streaming applications over wireless LANs such as in home and office environments. The execution of these operations is automatic and completely transparent to end users. Users are free of complex QoS configuration and multimedia service technology details. The scheme requires no changes of any existing protocols and network interface cards. A Linux-based wireless home gateway router is also prototyped. The performance results measured from the testbed show that the system achieves the goals of providing home users zero configuration and transparent QoS guarantees for multimedia streaming over wireless home networks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.