On managed services lanes and their use in home networks

Abstract

Home networks show an increasing level of heterogeneity regarding the devices connected, network technologies used, and services supported. Heterogeneity inhibits quality assurance for new services, such as online gaming, energy management, and health care. This paper focuses on the role that the concept of Managed Services Lanes (MSLs) plays in Dutch smart-city initiatives to solve these issues. MSLs provide third-party service providers quality guarantees without infringing network neutrality. Our preliminary experiments with extending MSLs into the home network indicate that end users indeed have a better quality of experience for the supported Neighborhood TV service than without MSLs. We also show that extension of MSLs into the home network requires advanced home networking monitoring technologies including dynamic home network traffic models. Our research provides evidence that such models will be very different from the standard Internet models.