Uplink traffic control in home 802.11 wireless networks

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 wireless networks become increasing more complex and interesting inside homes. A number of home automation, home security, and entertainment products rely on wireless technologies for easy deployment without the need for wiring. Moreover, a number of such applications are fundamentally changing the traffic mix of a home wireless network, resulting in uplink traffic that is not only triggered by the users but that could potentially be nearly continuous in nature, such as wireless home security products, where each individual camera is likely to stream large amounts of data in high traffic areas. Given the diversity of traffic sources and their importance to the user, wireless home APs today can ship with Wireless Multimedia (WMM) support that prioritizes VoIP and video traffic for better user experience. In this paper, however, we note that the type and importance of applications to a home user may be much more diverse than 4 traffic classes could accommodate. In response, we survey the landscape of possible solution in particular when it comes to pacing traffic sources inside the network. We discuss the tradeoffs that such a design space exposes and test the performance of several solutions using ns3 simulations. Finally, we note that instead of a strict prioritization of traffic streams, a simple mechanism by which the user can pace traffic to provision more resource to the traffic of importance may be sufficient.