A decentralized approach for topology discovery in home networks

Abstract

As electronic home appliances become smart, there have been many attempts to connect these appliances with a network. Accordingly, a concept of home networks has been emerged. Since most home network users do not have experiences or knowledge of network management, home networks have to be easily managed with minimal efforts of users. This paper presents a novel system for topology discovery and management in home networks. This system is fully distributed and automatically discovers topology information with minimal user configuration. It considers heterogeneous network media such as Ethernet, WLAN, and IEEE1394. It also provides QoS information by measuring available bandwidth. We have implemented this system on Linux and present experiment results to show the effectiveness Of the system(1).