The increasing availability of high speed Internet access and the decreasing cost of wireless technologies has increased the number of devices in the home that wirelessly connect to the Internet. While home user applications often have different network requirements, the wireless access point (AP) typically gives them all the same treatment. It has been shown that applications that are sensitive to delay, such as VoIP, remote login and online games suffer degraded performance when running concurrently with applications that expand to fill the available capacity, such as file sharing and downloading. Unfortunately, there are few mechanisms available at the AP to mitigate these effects other than for users to explicitly classify traffic based on port numbers or host IP addresses. This work proposes a novel home access point called CHAP that features credit-based queue management designed to eliminate the need for explicit classification and configuration of per-application quality. CHAP is implemented as a Linux queuing discipline and compared with a traditional AP forWeb browsing and online game activities. The comparisons demonstrate the merits of our approach.

Demonstration:

• http://perform.wpi.edu/chap/

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• Full paper: pdf
• Poster: pdf

See also:

• Choong-Soo Lee, Mark Claypool, and Robert Kinicki. A Credit-based Home Access Point (CHAP) to Improve Application Performance on IEEE 802.11 Networks, In Proceedings of the First ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys), Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, February 2010. Online at: http://www.cs.wpi.edu/~claypool/papers/chap/