Cousin-fair bandwidth allocation in intelligent digital home networks

This paper presents a cousin-fair bandwidth allocation strategy for UPnP home networks that focus on the application of movie streaming. To minimize 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 parameter Φ, which is determined by user preference, server loading and server hardware capability. 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 redundant bandwidth of search entities from all the 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 fairness are achieved.