Fundamental Change For Home Networking Required
The in-home data network is about to be radically transformed. Video in the forms of High Definition Television (HDTV) and Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) require very high throughput, as much as 20 megabits per second for a single video stream, and consistent latency. Viral videos, user created, captured or shared through email or sites such as YouTube, are going to add even more throughput demands on the network, both upstream and down. Gaming and digital video rentals through Amazon Unbox, iTunes, Hulu and others add even more demands. Ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) is becoming reality with hundreds of devices needing connectivity including; home security, energy management, home automation and many, many more.
Digital video is the largest inflection point for Internet usage since the creation of the internet. Industry estimates are that real-time traffic (IPTV and voice) will account for 85% of Internet data by the year 2010. Streaming video and voice require very low delays in packet delivery and are completely intolerant of packet loss. Dropped packets are instantly noticeable on a television as pixelation and screen freeze. Thus video is going to require a fundamental change in broadband with much greater bandwidth and mechanisms to ensure against delays and packet loss.
Video sharing of user created or captured material through email and video hosting sites like YouTube is becoming common. Today these Viral videos tend to be low resolution and low quality. With the accessibility of HD camcorders and high resolution capture sources the size of these videos will increase dramatically. A five minute recording from an HD camcorder is about a gigabyte in size. At a typical upstream speed of 768 kilobits per second it would take almost three hours to upload or email. Gigabyte size downloads are becoming more common with gaming and digital video rental services and will need to share the network with real time traffic.
Ubicomp is another large inflection point for the Internet. Over the next several years virtually everything in the home will get connected to the network including; appliances, home security sensors and controllers, energy management for HVAC and lighting, home automation and femtocells (cellular base stations attached to the Internet in homes and business). Hundreds of devices with relatively low bandwidth requirements but that still require routine attention and compete for that attention with higher priority real time traffic. Traditional networking technologies were not designed to share a single wire among many devices
IPTV, viral videos and ubicomp are going to require a fundamental change in how home networks operate. Hundreds of devices will need to coexist with a handful of very high bandwidth real time streams. Traditional networking technologies were not designed for these new demands.
Traditional Networks
Traditional digital networks are simply too slow and focus on a “best-effort” design. Best-effort means the network can delay or discard data packets when congestion occurs. Current usage of the Internet has focused on web data. If congestion occurs a file can be delayed or resent. Individual data demands are very sporadic and generally only require peak network bandwidth for very short time periods.
Best-effort networks work well for low density data like web browsing but problems occur with real-time applications. Quality of Service (QoS) methodologies are being employed to allow real time traffic over best effort networks by prioritizing traffic by type, so IPTV is higher priority than web browsing. But QoS struggles as multiple streams all require the highest priority and as hundreds of other lower priority devices compete with the streams for network time.
For QoS to work properly every device in the network between the IPTV server and consumer’s television has to be QoS aware and compliant. That includes home routers and other devices on the home network so IPTV service providers will have to manage these devices. Managing their customer’s home networks is not a business model that providers want to follow nor something that many consumers want to give up.
Wireless networks are the most common type of home network in use today. They allow easy connectivity but can not provide the throughput required for digital video. They also suffer from interference from other wireless networks and radio frequency devices including cordless phones, baby monitors and many others. Interference causes lost packets and is extremely noticeable on HDTVs. Future variants of 802.11 promise higher throughputs but can do very little about interference. For the foreseeable future wireless will not be the network technology of choice for high performance networking.
Lightwaves has developed a disruptive new technology, TimeFlux™ that addresses the shortcomings found in traditional network technologies to solve the home network problem.
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TimeFlux is a trademark of Lightwaves