Controlling Multimedia QoS in the Future Home Network Using the PSQA Metric

Home networks are becoming ubiquitous, especially since the advent of wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11. Coupled with this, there is an increase in the number of broadband-connected homes, and many new services are being deployed by broadband providers, such as TV and VoIP. The home network is thus becoming the ‘media hub’ of the house. This trend is expected to continue, and to expand into the Consumer Electronics (CE) market as well. This means new devices that can tap into the network in order to get their data, such as wireless TV sets, gaming consoles, tablet PCs etc. In this paper, we address the issue of evaluating the QoS provided for those media services, from the end-user’s point of view. We present a performance analysis of the home network in terms of perceived quality, and show how our real-time quality assessment technique can be used to dynamically control existing QoS mechanisms. This participates to minimizing resource consumption by tuning the appropriate QoS affecting parameters in order to keep the perceived quality (the ultimate target) within acceptable bounds.