An Empirical Study of the Design Space of Smart Home Routers

摘要

Home networks are becoming increasingly complex with the rising number of networked smart appliances with communication and control capabilities. These smart devices alongside diverse user applications usually share a single broadband access link via a router to access the Internet. The traffic streams competing for bandwidth on a best-effort basis may lead to poor quality-of-experience for users or malfunctioning of smart devices. Home routers used to only serve as dumb networking devices. Nevertheless, we expect that these routers will play a central role in communicating, networking and controlling emerging smart-home appliances. They should be programmable in a cost-effective way to efficiently transmit the real-time data, flexible in aggregating resources and convenient in providing management interfaces to upper-layer applications. The emerging software defined networking (SDN) offers a high degree of flexibility for implementing novel networking solutions to improve performances of distributed systems such as smart homes. The switching performance of the programmable switches is important for the forwarding service of the data plane after the traffic policies are deployed by the controller. In this paper, we conducted a measurement-based empirical study of the design space of different Open-Flow switches in multiple scenarios of a smart home network. Our testbed includes the performance of off-the-shelf commercial switches and FPGA-based networking boards. Our results demonstrate the trade-off between performance and flexibility for the OpenFlow switches. This empirical study focused on the throughput performance which is measured for different software-based OpenFlow switches. Zynq-based FPGA boards with networking capabilities demonstrate good potentials to facilitate the experimentation and implementation with high flexibility and sufficiently good performance. Our experiment results may provide insights into constructing evolvable and cost-effective software defined smart home routers with enhanced performance under budget constraints.