Using Active Queue Management to Assist IoT Application Flows in Home Broadband Networks

Internet of Things (IoT) applications such as telehealth, smart appliances, and smart energy are becoming more common within the home. However, they must compete for bandwidth with traditional applications such as video streaming, video conferencing, and bulk file transfers. Such competition can be detrimental to the IoT applications when home gateways use traditional first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue management. Simply increasing bandwidth between the home gateway and the Internet Service Provider (ISP), even when possible, provides no guarantee of bandwidth for IoT applications since many traditional applications will consume as much bandwidth as is available. In this paper, we explore whether active queue management (AQM), now being implemented in home gateways, can provide protection for IoT flows. We investigate the effect of different AQM algorithms deployed at the home gateway in scenarios with multiple concurrent application flows. We find that deploying multiqueue FlowQueue Controlled Delay (FQ-CoDel) or the hybrid FlowQueue Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (FQ-PIE) at the home gateway can provide excellent capacity sharing, flow isolation, and good protection in terms of throughput and queuing delays for IoT flows and other applications, which cannot be achieved with traditional FIFO or other single-queue AQMs such as Proportional Integral Controller Enhanced (PIE).