Evaluation of UPnP QoS framework performance in wireless LAN

The rapidly increasing amount of networked devices in consumers' homes poses challenges in maintaining the local area network (LAN) performance in a satisfactory level. This paper overviews the UPnP QoS architecture and concentrates especially on experimental performance evaluation of an implementation of the architecture. The UPnP QoS framework implementation is subjected to measurements in different traffic conditions. The measurements show that the overhead caused by the QoS setup signaling is reasonable and the latency of the setup is relatively low. Based on the measurements it is concluded that the UPnP QoS architecture works well in the case of moderate traffic loads, but may fail if the network becomes overloaded. This could be avoided by assigning the UPnP QoS signaling higher priority than the other traffic.