| Wireless Home Networks (WHNs) are critical at the edge of the Internet both in terms of number of deployments, and due to their economic and social impact. Therefore, the success and continued growth of these online services depends on WHN performance and the quality of experience WHNs provide.;This dissertation makes two major contributions in the area of wireless home networking. First, this work characterizes WHNs and identifies some performance challenges faced by these networks. These challenges, combined with increasing demands on these networks, will prevent WHNs from providing high quality user experience; this would have a serious impact on the growth of online services. Second, this work demonstrates how protocols to improve WHN performance should be designed. Existing performance improvement protocols do not consider WHN characteristics and have limited, if any, impact when used in WHNs. This work shows that an Access Point (AP) centric approach, that accounts for WHN characteristics, is the right way to improve WHN performance.;We begin with a characterization of WHNs to develop an understanding that enables us to identify performance challenges faced by these networks. WHNs face a number of technical challenges that limit their capability to provide high quality user experience. This limitation can stunt the growth of the online services market. We then develop an approach to solve these performance problems in WHNs. The challenges faced by WHNs lead to problems such as low throughput, large variations in throughput, instability, and unfairness. To understand the impact of these problems, and develop approaches to mitigate them, we use applications that make up the majority of traffic in WHNs: Voice over IP and video streaming.;The final contribution of this work is a performance analysis of video streaming over WHNs in the presence of an overlapping WHN. This work shows that video streaming, the most prevalent application over the Internet, can suffer from extremely poor performance in the presence of even a single neighboring WHN. We extend this analysis, using simulation, to show that any flow over TCP can suffer from starvation in the presence of a neighboring WHN. |
