UPnP-based QoS Agent for QoS-guaranteed Streaming Service in Home Networks

As AN (audio/video) services over IP networks become popular, there has been much interest in using home networking technology to provide QoS (quality of service)guaranteed AN services. For QoS-guaranteed AN services, reservation or allocation schemes are usually used to control the demand of network bandwidth. However, these approaches have some limitations that discourage practical implementations. It requires that all applications participate in the reservation system. It can not manage actual network resource status, since it does not provide dynamic network resource monitoring scheme. To provide QoS-guaranteed AN services, it is necessary to know actual network resource status, although all applications are not in the reservation system. We propose a middleware module that can improve existing reservation-style approaches, namely "QoSAgent", based on standard home networking protocol. Based on UPnP (universal plug and play) QoS services, the QoSAgent monitors network resource status and adapts its streaming services to varying network status. From the VideoLAN-based implementation, we confirm that the proposed approach can be used for QoS-guaranteed streaming services in home networks.