Media transfer with dynamic bandwidth adjustment in IoT-based home networks

Many home-network devices now possess data computing, networking, and media processing functions in smart home space. The increasing and volatile data workload passing through a home gateway from and into home networks or the Internet may cause some issues about data throughput, traffic congestion, quality of service, etc. This situation leads to an interesting study on network resource allocation and management in home environments. This paper proposes a network bandwidth allocation and control mechanism that can be applied at the front edge of the Internet of Things. This mechanism can continuously monitor data throughput between cloud servers, gateways and multiple home-networked devices, and dynamically adjust media content on different network connections. Thus, this mechanism can maintain network and media transfer services in home networks. Our study also develops a simplified prototype to verify the proposed mechanism. Experimental results show expected effects on reducing transmission delay time as keeping the media transfer services in a satisfactory level of quality of service.