Policy Refinement for Traffic Management in Home Area Networks – Problem Statement

Traditional home area network (HAN) equipment is usually unmanaged and network traffic is served in best effort fashion. This type of unmanaged network sometimes causes quality-of-service issues in the HAN, for example loss of quality in streamed video or audio content. Traffic management rules using policies to prioritise certain types of traffic according to user requirements and to assign bandwidth limits to other traffic types. However very little work has been done yet addressing the specification of these requirements, how they would be communicated to the gateway device using policies, and how the policies would be refined into device level configurations to effectively implement the user requirements. In this paper we briefly discuss this as a research problem, placing it within the context of the research goals and an initial research methodology in the area of policy refinement for policy-based traffic management in home area networks (HANs).