Convergence in Home Gigabit Networks: Implementation of the Inter-MAC Layer as a Pluggable Kernel Module

Many new broadband, emerging applications such as high definition 3D video streaming or on-line gaming are going to be part of the future home. Current home networks are still not capable to cope with the tight requirements asked by these kind of applications. Moreover, many underlying wired and wireless transmission technologies are available, but no solution to reach a convergent framework is available. In this paper, we present a preliminary software implementation of a novel solution, called Inter-MAC, that realizes the convergence at MAC layer enabling a reliable and high performance delivery of application data and services. Our results show how it is possible to split flows onto different technologies when the overloading of a single link would cause unacceptable delay and packet loss results. This is done in a plug and play fashion: loading a kernel module in a running Linux machine.