Bandwidth Allocation Strategy for Intelligent Digital Home Networks

Abstract

This paper presents a cousin-fair bandwidth allocation strategy for UPnP home networks that focus on the application of movie streaming. To simplify the installation process and obtain the most user preferable content among devices, UPnP and MPEG-7 are applied. In this paper, bandwidth allocation for search entities (i.e., movies) is base on a bandwidth allocation weight (Ф), and then the server containing the search entity can choose a corresponding quality of movies for streaming service. Traditionally, if the bandwidth allocation of some search entity is over the server loading, the bandwidth sharing can only be performed among the search entities from the same requestor, called sibling-fair. However, cousin-fair is a bandwidth sharing strategy that shares the over-allocated bandwidth of search entities from different requestors. Additionally, two improved methods, i.e., gated-service and re-provision, have been employed. By using the proposed bandwidth-based multi-quality streaming mechanism, both high bandwidth utilization and throughput maximization are achieved.