Department of Teleinformatics Network Services Royal Institute of Technology
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- 2.2Examples
- 2.2.2E-box (Ericsson)
- 2.3Limitations Today
2Home Networking2.1VisionWith today’s cheap PCs, it has become increasingly common to find multiple computers within a single household. Maybe there is one in the home office connected to the corporate LAN through a modem and to a printer. Another computer may reside in the teenager’s room equipped with state of the art multimedia devices and a scanner. A third computer could be found in the children’s bedroom, mainly used for computer games and educational applications. Now, what if one would like to use the scanner to scan an image into an educational application and then print it out on the printer. Alternatively, if everyone want to be able to access the Internet through the modem connection in the home office? The solution to these problems is to interconnect the three computers making a local area network in the home – a home LAN or home network. This enables resource sharing, which will become even more important in a near future with increasing varieties of network aware products and appliances. Probably future home electronics will be interconnected enabling new interesting possibilities of accessing everything wherever you are, whenever you are there. For example, one could pop in a CD in the player located in the living room and then continue listening to it through the speakers in the kitchen while preparing dinner. 
Figure 2.1 A typical home network scenario. Besides communicating locally on the home network, users probably want to be able to access common networks such as the Internet, as stated earlier. In the 1960s, the Internet was only accessible to a few academic scientists in their labs. The Internet grew beyond the lab boundaries and soon universities and commercial companies could get access. The next natural step in this evolution is to get the broadband Internet access into the households and make it as common as today’s telephone and TV distribution mediums. A fast connection to the Internet is believed to be one of the driving forces to establish the home networking concept. Another important aspect of home networks is home automation. This concept will give you the ability to control and monitor your house, even if you are not at home by connecting to your home network from your office, your car or from the airplane on your way to Hawaii! It will also be possible to create “smart” houses by letting the house take advantage of sensors distributed over the house, and use them to adjust parameters such as heat, light and humidity. With hundreds of millions of households in the world, the home network market is enormous and will definitely involve many companies in the future. Both hardware and software vendors will have lucrative possibilities. Many experts believe that the home network market will explode in the next couple of years, which drives the development of the architecture faster than ever before. The possibilities and applications for home LANs seems endless but are beyond the scope of this report. More information about home networking can be found in any of the numerous reports or articles written in this topic. 2.2Examples2.2.1Residential Gateway (Telia)At Telia Research AB, home networks are a hot topic in research projects. The development has brought the concept with a home server called Residential Gateway (RG). An RG is placed between the access network and the home LAN in each home and acts as a border gateway to the home LAN. It also acts as a communications central featuring multiple connectivity interfaces such as Ethernet or IEEE 1394 (Firewire) for Internet access, POTS for analog telephony and LonWorks for home automation. A user may access the RG through a web interface which lets the user configure its home, both from inside the home LAN and remotely. Besides web server software, the RG contains firewall and routing software to provide Internet access. 2.2.2E-box (Ericsson)Ericsson also wants to take part in the home network market. Their contribution is a home server similar to the RG called the e-box. The e-box provides much the same functionality as the RG, except for the POTS connectivity. It is however equipped with two I/O-slots, which can be fitted with various interface cards to expand connection possibilities. T   oday, the e-box is already available as a prototype to the market. Despite the lack of IP enabled appliances, this is an important step to show the customers where the development is leading. Figure 2.2 Telia’s RG and Ericsson’s e-box 2.3Limitations TodayHome networking is still a vision. Many companies and research labs are involved in the development and have already presented working prototypes and solutions suitable for home LANs. However, there are limitations with today’s technologies which delays further development in several areas.
The development in overcoming the problems mentioned above has come far the last few years, which should help to eliminate them in a near future. However, even without those problems it would be hard to achieve the home networking vision due to the current limitations of the Internet protocol, which is responsible for all data transfers over the Internet. The current version of the Internet protocol (IPv4) was simply not designed with home networking in mind. It lacks desired functionality such as security, bandwidth allocation (QoS) and easy administration and configuration. In the following, the new Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) will be studied as an alternative to today’s IPv4. After an overview of the protocol, the scenario of using it in a home network environment will be covered. Download 290.3 Kb. Share with your friends:
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