Real time traffic classification and prioritisation on a home router using DIFFUSE

Quality of Service (QoS) is important in multi-user residential networks that share a common bandwidth-constrained Internet connection. A limited upstream bandwidth can become a bottleneck and the performance of delay-sensitive applications---such as VoIP and online games---can degrade significantly when latency is introduced by other traffic flows. Current residential router QoS support must be manually configured and set up is difficult for the average home user. The DIFFUSE (DIstributed Firewall and Flow-shaper Using Statistical Evidence) architecture has been developed to provide automated IP traffic classification and treatment based on statistical flow properties. This paper provides some preliminary performance results of DIFFUSE on a TP-Link TL-WR1043ND home Internet router running OpenWRT Linux. We find that DIFFUSE can be successfully built for and run on the TL-WR1043ND. The router is able to perform flow classification for at least 5,000 concurrent flows. With prioritisation enabled an upstream throughput of 24.5 Mbps is achieved. The router is able to identify and prioritise flows in a realistic home-network scenario.