Wireless home entertainment center
Claudio Enrico Palazzi, Giovanni Pau, Marco Roccetti, Stefano Ferretti, Mário Gerla · 2006
Future digital entertainment services available to home users will share several characteristics: i) they will be deployed and delivered through the Internet, ii) a single media center will be exploited to orchestrate all parallel services, and iii) wireless technologies integrated within the home entertainment system will be massively utilized for the transmission of various data streams to networked devices. In this scenario, new effective strategies are needed to regulate the concurrent access to the wireless network when parallel applications generate different but simultaneous UDP/TCP-based flows. In this work, we present a novel technique aimed at guaranteeing a fast and smooth data delivery for real-time streams while maintaining a high throughput for TCP-based applications. Our approach is based on the utilization of a smart Access Point able to exploit available information about the ongoing traffic and existing features of the regular TCP. We compare the performance of our solution with an alternative one that makes use of an optimal setting of the 802-11 MAC layer parameters. Simulation results confirm that our smart Access Point represents an optimal candidate to be exploited in complex wireless scenarios for in-home entertainment.