Effect of AV Traffic on UPNP Advertisements in a Home Network Environment

Universal plug and play (UPnP) is a widely accepted and most popular candidate for Consumer Electronics' (CE) critical function of devices and services discovery, eventing, access and control at home network (HNet), The impact of bursty and high bandwidth audio video (AV) streaming in HNet which is to be the common scenario is not much explored. Timely UPnP message advertisements and delivery are critical to ensure actual device or service status is propagated to all users or devices in HNet for optimal user experience. Home CE devices are critical in terms of processing power and memory. It is also common to have display devices such as television to be the monitoring and control device for other tiny devices which are incapable of displaying information. Therefore, this paper aims to briefly analyze the challenges of HNet and study the impact of AV streaming on UPnP advertisements by running an AV client and an AV server in a Ethernet-based HNet for AV content streaming while multiple UPnP devices are simulated in the same network to understand further the effectiveness of the message delay. Selected messages from UPnP 1.0 specification were used for this purpose on the UPnP AV testbed