An Investigation on the Performance of Highly Congested Home WiFi Networks During the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract

Due to COVID-19, many people throughout the world have had to suddenly transition to working and studying from home. This has led to an increase in data traffic in the home WiFi networks using the 802.11ac or 802.11n routers. In this paper, we have investigated the performance of the home WiFi networks in supporting the quality-of-service (QoS) needs of multiple home users concurrently watching streaming videos, playing online games, participating in online meetings, downloading huge files, etc. We measured the performance of these traffic streams using metrics such as delay, throughput, MOS-LQO (Mean Opinion Score - Listening Quality Objective) metric for audio streams and the VMAF (Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion) metric for video streams. Our results indicated that under highly congested network conditions, the 802.11ac router’s default settings performs the best in supporting the multiple concurrent traffic streams. In particular, our results show that the WMM 802.11e QoS feature in the router is critical to the router’s ability to prioritize video and audio traffic over other normal data traffic, and hence should always be enabled. Our results also show that the 802.11n router should be configured to operate in the 5 GHz frequency band. This is to avoid the congested 2.4 GHz frequency band and therefore enable the 802.11n router to support the QoS needs of the home users.