Digital Gateways for Multimedia Home Networks

Residential networks are expected to open a huge market and introduce a bright, new era in telecommunications, by exponentially increasing the network usage, via broadband, added value services. Despite the business risks, investments made by the telecommunication industries clearly express the belief that the home networking market is about to take off. In this paper, a home network architecture for the provision of interactive multimedia services is considered and various access and indoor networking alternatives are presented. Then the focus is put on the Residential Gateway (RG), as a single point of networks convergence. Based on prototypes development, laboratory experiments and field trials throughout Europe and USA, a modular and a compact RG hardware architecture are described and compared, while the software architecture to support the RG functionality is described and the main building blocks are analyzed. Finally, a Web browser-based network management and control application that provides a visual metaphor of the RG is presented. This revised version was published online in September 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Multimedia Home Telecommunication Systems Guest Editorial

Telecommunication Systems -     

Global roaming in next-generation networks

Next-generation mobile/wireless networks are already under preliminary deployment. Mobile/wireless all-IP networks are expected to provide a substantially wider and enhanced range of services. However, an evolutionary rather than revolutionary approach to the deployment of a global all-IP wireless/mobile network is expected. To support global roaming, next-generation networks will require the integration and interoperation of mobility management processes under a worldwide wireless communications infrastructure. In this article global roaming is addressed as one of the main issues of next-generation mobile networks. Apart from the physical layer connectivity and radio spectrum allocation plans, mobility in a hierarchical structured scheme is discussed. An all-IP wireless/mobile network combined with inherited mobility schemes of each network layer and Mobile IP extensions is proposed. In this respect the mobility management mechanisms in WLAN, cellular, and satellite networks are analyzed, and an all-IP architecture is described and an enhanced roaming scenario presented     

A comparison of competing broadband in-home technologies

Connecting each house to a broadband access network represents an unprecedented opportunity to offer added-value services and broadband Internet access to residential users and expand the customer base beyond the corporate environment. Home networks, however, may be the last barrier to end-to-end multimedia service provisioning. Although a large number of houses have PCs, modems or multimedia network-enabled appliances, the majority are not equipped to support their interconnection, and most consumers are unwilling or cannot afford large-scale home rewiring. This paper reviews the available home-networking technologies and provides a comparison of the competing broadband in-home technologies. The focus is on technologies that do not require rewiring the home, either reusing the existing wiring or using wireless technology. The paper also discusses the residential gateway (RG) initiative, which provides a single point of convergence between the in-home and the access networks     

Seamless content delivery in the future mobile internet - guest editorial

The Internet is incontrovertibly a great success that has changed our social and economic world. Today, over one billion users access the Internet on regular basis, more than 100 million users have downloaded at least one (multi) media file, and over 47 million of them do so regularly, searching in more than 160 exabytes of content. The content is expected to rise to more than 990 exabytes before 2012, fueled mainly by the users themselves [1]. It is envisaged that in the near- to mid-term future, mobile Internet will provide the means to share and distribute (new) multimedia content and services with superior quality and striking flexibility, in a trusted and personalized way, improving citizens? quality of life, working conditions, edutainment, and safety.     

A Novel Trust-Aware Geographical Routing Scheme for Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks are vulnerable to a wide set of security attacks, including those targeting the routing protocol functionality. The applicability of legacy security solutions is disputable (if not infeasible), due to severe restrictions in node and network resources. Although confidentiality, integrity and authentication measures assist in preventing specific types of attacks, they come at high cost and, in most cases, cannot shield against routing attacks. To face this problem, we propose a secure routing protocol which adopts the geographical routing principle to cope with the network dimensions, and relies on a distributed trust model for the detection and avoidance of malicious neighbours. A novel function which adaptively weights location, trust and energy information drives the routing decisions, allowing for shifting emphasis from security to path optimality. The proposed trust model relies on both direct and indirect observations to derive the trustworthiness of each neighboring node, while it is capable of defending against an increased set of routing attacks including attacks targeting the indirect trust management scheme. Extensive simulation results reveal the advantages of the proposed model.