QoS technology for home networks

With the wide-spread of the Internet technologies, and the increasing number of users owning networking devices at homes, home LANs are becoming a popular utility to us. Home LANs may be established on two distinct Layer 2 technologies, i.e., wired and wireless Ethernet, each of which has variants providing different communication modes and speeds. There appears a large demand in the home network area of the use of applications such as real-time communication with audio/video (AV) appliance and IP telephony, all of which require QoS. To provide QoS in a network, it is necessary to discover the network topology and available resources, e.g., the used Layer 2 type, the provided communication speed, and the configured communication mode. This paper presents a mechanism for topology discovery and resource reservation, which can quickly detect network changes.