Home Network

Wireless personal area network and wireless sensor networks are rapidly gaining popularity, and the IEEE 802.15 Wireless Personal Area Working Group has defined no less than different standards so as to cater to the requirements of different applications. The ubiquitous home network has gained widespread attentions due to its seamless integration into everyday life. This innovative system transparently unifies various home appliances, smart sensors and energy technologies. The smart energy market requires two types of ZigBee networks for device control and energy management. Today, organizations use IEEE 802.15.4 and ZigBee to effectively deliver solutions for a variety of areas including consumer electronic device control, energy management and efficiency, home and commercial building automation as well as industrial plant management.

This paper introduces PARO, a power-aware routing optimization that helps to minimize the transmission power needed to forward packets between wireless devices in ad hoc networks. Using PARO, one or more intermediate nodes called "redirectors" elects to forward packets on behalf of source-destination pairs thus reducing the aggregate transmission power consumed by wireless devices. PARO is applicable to a number of networking environments including sensor networks, home networks and mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present the detailed design of PARO and evaluate the protocol using simulation and experimentation. We show through simulation that PARO is capable of outperforming traditional broadcast-based routing protocols (e.g., MANET routing protocols) due to its power conserving point-to-point on-demand design. We discuss some initial experiences from an early implementation of the protocol in an experimental wireless testbed using offthe-shelf radio technology.

The past decade has seen significant advancement in the field of consumer electronics. Various 'intelligent' appliances such as cellular phones, air-conditioners, home security devices, home theatres, etc. are set to realize the concept of a smart home. They have given rise to a Personal Area Network in home environment, where all these appliances can be interconnected and monitored using a single controller. Busy families and individuals with physical limitation represent an attractive market for home automation and networking. A wireless home network that does not incur additional costs of wiring would be desirable. Bluetooth technology, which has emerged in late 1990s, is an ideal solution for this purpose. This paper describes an application of Bluetooth technology in home automation and networking environment. It proposes a network, which contains a remote, mobile host controller and several client modules (home appliances). The client modules communicate with the host controller through Bluetooth devices. q

This paper is concerned with improving the software engineering of agent-based open systems. It critiques the existing Gaia methodology in the light of a motivating example of intelligent home networks. It describes the ROADMAP 1 methodology, which extends Gaia with four improvements -formal models of knowledge and the environment, role hierarchies, explicit representation of social structures and relationships, and incorporation of dynamic changes.

As the number of Mobile IP (MIP) [2] users grow, so will the demand for delay sensitive real-time applications, such as audio streaming, that require seamless handoff, namely, a packet lossless Quality-of-Service guarantee during a handoff. Two well-known approaches in reducing the MIP handoff latency have been proposed in the literature. One aims to reduce the (home) network registration time through a hierarchical management structure, while the other tries to minimize the lengthy address resolution delay by address pre-configuration through what is known as the fast-handoff mechanism. We present a novel seamless handoff architecture, S-MIP, that builds on top of the hierarchical approach [4] and the fast-handoff mechanism [3], in conjunction with a newly developed handoff algorithm based on pure software-based movement tracking techniques [16]. Using a combination of simulation and mathematical analysis, we argue that our architecture is capable of providing packet lossless handoff with latency similar to that of L2 handoff delay when using the 802.11 access technology. More importantly, S-MIP has a signaling overhead equal to that of the well-known 'integrated' hierarchical MIP with fasthandoff scheme [4], within the portion of the network that uses wireless links. In relation to our S-MIP architecture, we discuss issues regarding the construction of network architecture, movement tracking, registration, address resolution, handoff algorithm and data handling.

Power lines were originally devised to transmit electric power from a small number of sources (the generators) to a large number of sinks (the consumers) in the frequency range of 50-60 Hz. Initially, the first data transmissions over power lines were primarily done only to protect sections of the power distribution system in case of faults. (In fact, power line protection remains one of the primary functions of power line communications.) In such an event, the fast exchange of information is necessary between power plants, substations 4

This paper introduces PARO, a dynamic power controlled routing scheme that helps to minimize the transmission power needed to forward packets between wireless devices in ad hoc networks. Using PARO, one or more intermediate nodes called “redirectors” elects to forward packets on behalf of source–destination pairs thus reducing the aggregate transmission power consumed by wireless devices. PARO is applicable to a number of networking environments including wireless sensor networks, home networks and mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we present the detailed design of PARO and evaluate the protocol using simulation and experimentation. We show through simulation that PARO is capable of outperforming traditional broadcast-based routing protocols (e.g., MANET routing protocols) due to its energy conserving point-to-point on-demand design. We discuss our experiences from an implementation of the protocol in an experimental wireless testbed using off-the-shelf radio technology. We also evaluate the impact of dynamic power controlled routing on traditional network performance metrics such as end-to-end delay and throughput.

In this paper, we explore the benefits of videochat for families and the corresponding work that home users engage in to make a video call run smoothly. We explore the varieties of social work required, including coordination work, presentation work, behavioral work, and scaffolding work, as well as the technical work necessary. We outline the benefits families enjoy for doing this work and discuss the ways in which families use videochat to reinforce their identity as a family and reinforce their family values, in effect making -as in creating -love. We conclude with recommendations for improving videochat and for designing with family values in mind more generally.

Virtual machines can greatly simplify wide-area distributed computing by lowering the level of abstraction to the benefit of both resource providers and users. Networking, however, can be a challenge because remote sites are loath to provide connectivity to any machine attached to the site network by outsiders. In response, we have developed a simple and efficient layer two virtual network tool that in effect connects the virtual machine to the home network of the user, making the connectivity problem identical to that faced by the user when connecting any new machine to his own network. We describe this tool and evaluate its performance in LAN and WAN environments. Next, we describe our plans to enhance it to become an adaptive virtual network that will dynamically modify its topology and routing rules in response to the offered traffic load of the virtual machines it supports and to the load of the underlying network. We formalize the adaptation problem induced by this scheme and take initial steps to solving it. The virtual network will also be able to use underlying resource reservation mechanisms on behalf of virtual machines. Both adaptation and reservation will work with existing, unmodified applications and operating systems.

... CITATION. Fletcher, AC, Darling, NE, Steinberg, L., & Dornbusch, S. (1995). ... Cochran (1990) suggested that the importance of nonrelated adults as influences in children's lives may also increase as children grow older, with such individuals becoming especially influential during ...

Using the existing home infrastructure based on open industry standards, we will be able to integrate the home network with external networks to easily manage home devices, both locally and remotely. The advent of pervasive computing marks an urgent need for a new generation of intelligent sensing agents and information appliances. It will also demand environments for resource management of broad applications involving loosely coupled, event-driven, diverse information appliances. It is suggested that the development of intelligent sensing agents and sensor-based information appliances will spread pervasive technology to a multitude of human activities such as mining and manufacturing, security, transportation, sports, and health care. The topics discussed also include management of heterogeneous functions and networking technologies.

Smart Home technology started for more than a decade to introduce the concept of networking devices and equipment in the house. According to the Smart Homes Association the best definition of smart home technology is: the integration of technology and services through home networking for a better quality of living.

Low voltage electrical wiring has largely been dismissed as too noisy and unpredictable to support high-speed communication signals. Advances in communication and modulation methodologies as well as in adaptive digital signal processing and error detection and correction have spawned novel protocols capable of supporting power line communication networks at speeds comparable to wired LANs. We motivate the use of power line LANs as a basic infrastructure for building integrated smart homes, wherein information appliances ranging from simple control or monitoring devices to multimedia entertainment systems are seamlessly interconnected by the very wires that provide them electricity. By simulation and actual measurements using "reference design" prototype commercial powerline products, we show that the HomePlug MAC and PHY layers can guarantee QoS for real-time communications, supporting delay-sensitive data streams for smart home applications.

The wireless token ring protocol (WTRP) is a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol for wireless local area networks (WLANs). In contrast with IEEE 802.11 networks, WTRP guarantees quality of service (QoS) in terms of bounded latency and reserved bandwidth, which are critical in many real-time applications. Compared to 802.11, WTRP improves efficiency by reducing the number of retransmissions due to collisions, and it is more fair as all stations use the channel for the same amount of time. Stations take turns transmitting and give up the right to transmit after a specified amount of time. WTRP is a distributed protocol that supports many topologies, as not all stations need to be connected to each other or to a central station. WTRP is robust against single node failures, and recovers gracefully from multiple simultaneous faults. WTRP is suitable for interaccess point coordination in ITS DSRC, safety-critical vehicle-to-vehicle communications, and home networking, and provides extensions to other networks and Mobile IP.

Mobile IPv4 has long been considered as the de facto standard in providing mobility on the Internet. However, as the demand for wireless mobile devices capable of executing realtime applications increases, it has necessitated the development of better handoff techniques, for providing superior handoff latency and Quality of Service (QoS), than the current Mobile IPv4. Its contention successor, the Mobile IPv6, is designed to resolve these issues, together with numerous applicable optimization techniques. Two ways of reducing the handoff latency, in both IPv4 and IPv6 have been proposed in the literature. One aims to reduce the (home) network registration time while the other in reducing the lengthy address resolution time when in a visiting network. We present a performance analysis of the current IETF proposals in achieving this in an IPv6 network, namely, the Hierarchical Mobile IPv6 architecture and the Fast-handoff mechanism. The former is aimed at reducing the registration time while the later in reducing the address resolution time. We show through simulation that managing registration process in a hierarchical fashion greatly reduces the overall handoff latency. Comparatively, the fasthandoff mechanism is even more capable in reducing the handoff latency. As speculated, the simple superimposition of these two frameworks produces the best overall handoff latency result. However, the overall improvement is not a simple aggregation of the individual handoff latency gain. In fact, we discovered some rather non-trivial traffic behavior when these two frameworks are combined together in operation. We identified the causes which hinder the handoff performance and therefore devise a set of design guidelines in further improving the handoff latency.

This paper describes the results of real deployment of A 2 S which consists of WSN(Wireless Sensor Network) to monitor and control the environments and a management sub-system to manage the WSN and provide various and convenient services to consumers with hand-held devices such as a PDA living a farming village. The WSN were deployed in greenhouses with melon and cabbage in Dongbu Handong Seed Research Center. A 2 S was used to monitor the growing process of them and control the environment of the greenhouses. We acquired valuable experiences and ideas from this real deployment and operation of A 2 S and believe that they can be useful in consumer electronics field such as home network as well as automated agriculture field. . 1

Electric load forecasting is essential to improve the reliability of the ac power line data network and provide optimal load scheduling in an intelligent home system. In this paper, a short-term load forecasting realized by a neural fuzzy network (NFN) and a modified genetic algorithm (GA) is proposed. It can forecast the hourly load accurately with respect to different day types and weather information. By introducing new genetic operators, the modified GA performs better than the traditional GA under some benchmark test functions. The optimal network structure can be found by the modified GA when switches in the links of the network are introduced. The membership functions and the number of rules of the NFN can be obtained automatically. Results for a short-term load forecasting will be given.

Cloud computing allows accessing resources across Internet transparently: requiring no expertise in, or control over the underlying infrastructure. There is an increasing interest in sharing media files with family and friends. However, UPnP or DLNA were not designed for media distribution beyond the boundaries of a local network and manage media files through web applications can be tedious. To overcome this problem, we propose Media Cloud, a middleware for Set-top boxes for classifying, searching, and delivering media inside home network and across the cloud that interoperates with UPnP and DLNA 1 .

With the growing demand for wireless Internet access and increasing maturity of IEEE 802.11 technologies, wireless networks have sprung up by the millions throughout the world as a popular means for Internet access. An increasingly popular use of Wi-Fi networking equipment is to provide wireless 'hotspots' as the wireless access points (APs) to the Internet. These APs are installed and managed by individuals and businesses in an unregulated mannerallowing anyone to install and operate one of these devices using unlicensed radio spectrum. This has allowed literally millions of these APs to become available and 'visible' to any interested party who happens to be within range of the radio waves emitted from the device. As the density of these APs increases, these 'beacons' can be put into multiple uses. From home networking to wireless positioning to mesh networks, there are more alternative ways for connecting wirelessly as newer, longer-range technologies come to market. This paper reports an initial study that examines a database of over 5 million wireless access points collected through systematic wardriving by Skyhook Wireless. By performing the analytical study of this data including the default naming behavior, movement of access points over time, and density of access points, we found that the AP data, coupled with location information, can provide a fertile ground for understanding the "What, Where and Why" of Wi-Fi access points. More importantly, the analysis and mining of this vast and growing collection of AP data can yield important technological, social and economical results.

This paper exploits ethnographic findings to build on and elaborate Grinter et al's 2005 study of "the work to make the home network work". We focus particularly on the work involved in setting up and maintaining home networks, which we characterize as 'digital housekeeping'. Our studies reveal that it is through digital housekeeping that the home network is 'made at home' or made into an unremarkable and routine feature of domestic life. The orderly ways in which digital housekeeping 'gets done' elaborate a distinct 'social machinery' that highlights some important implications for the continued development of network technologies for the home. These include a requirement that designers take existing infrastructure into account and pay considerable attention to how future technologies may be incorporated into existing routines. The preoccupation of household members with making the home network transparent and accountable so that it is available to practical reasoning suggests designers should also consider the development of dedicated management interfaces to support digital housekeeping.

This paper presents an authentication and key agreement protocol to streamline communication activities for a group of mobile stations (MSs) roaming from the same home network (HN) to a serving network (SN). In such a roaming scenario, conventional schemes require the SN to interact with the HN for authenticating respective MSs, at the cost of repeated message exchanges and communication delay. Instead, in our design, when the first MS of a group visits, the SN performs full authentication with the concerned HN and thereby obtains authentication information for the MS and other members. Thus when any other MS of the same group visits, the SN can authenticate locally without subsequent involvement of the HN, so as to simplify protocol operations. We will show that our scheme does not trade performance for security and robustness to the extent that security requirements are unduly weakened. Both qualitative and quantitative discussions indicate that our proposed scheme lends itself to pragmatic settings.

An OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) home gateway system manages the integration of heterogeneous home networks protocols and devices to develop ubiquitous applications. Wired and wireless heterogeneous home networks have different QoS concerns. For instance, jitter and latency are important concerns in web phones, while packet loss ratio is important in on-line video. This study adopts UPnP QoS specification version 1.0 to design an adaptive QoS management mechanism based on the RMD (Resource Management in DiffServ) architecture. This study monitors real-time network traffic, and adaptively controls the bandwidth, to satisfy the minimum but most important quality for each application in home network congestion. Simulation results indicate that the average jitter, latency and packet loss are reduced by 0.1391 ms, 0.0066 s, and 5.43%, respectively. The packet loss ratio is reduced by 4.53%, and the throughput is increased by 1.2% in high definition video stream; the packet loss ratio is reduced by 1.89% for standard definition video stream, and in VoIP (Voice over IP) the jitter and latency are reduced to 0.0407 ms and 0.0209 s, respectively.

Firewalls are core elements in network security. However, managing firewall rules, especially for enterprise networks, has become complex and error-prone. Firewall filtering rules have to be carefully written and organized in order to correctly implement the security policy. In ...

We present the first empirical study of home network availability, infrastructure, and usage, using data collected from home networks around the world. In each home, we deploy a router with custom firmware to collect information about the availability of home broadband network connectivity, the home network infrastructure (including the wireless connectivity in each home network and the number of devices connected to the network), and how people in each home network use the network. Downtime is more frequent and longer in developing countries-sometimes due to the network, and in other cases because users simply turn off their home router. We also find that some portions of the wireless spectrum are extremely crowded, that diurnal patterns are more pronounced during the week, and that most traffic in home networks is exchanged over a few connections to a small number of domains. Our study is both a preliminary view into many home networks and an illustration of how measurements from a home router can yield significant information about home networks.

The end-to-end delay (also referred to as latency) experienced by gaming users has a significant impact on the quality of online games. In this paper we concentrate on the delay introduced in access networks. This access network delay depends on the access technology used, the network load, the link rate configured on the access links (also referred to as the last mile link) and the size of the packets generated by the games. We characterize this access network delay by means of measurements. First, we focus on this delay in actually deployed access networks: dial-up, cable and Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) access. In these access networks the access network delay shoots up as soon as the gaming user (or somebody else on the user's home network) saturates the user's last mile link with traffic generated by applications (e.g. web browser) other than the games. Therefore, we also characterize the access network delay in a laboratory set-up of a QoS-enabled ADSL network. In this set-up we show that it is possible to (logically) segregate the game traffic from the other traffic to such an extent that the game packets are not excessively delayed while at the same time a large part of the link capacity can be consumed by the other traffic.

Virtual machine distributed computing greatly simplifies the use of widespread computing resources by lowering the level of abstraction, benefiting both resource providers and users. Towards that end our Virtuoso middleware closely emulates the existing process of buying, configuring and using physical machines. Virtuoso's VNET component is a simple and efficient layer two virtual network tool that makes these virtual machines (VMs) appear to be physically connected to the home network of the user while simultaneously supporting arbitrary topologies and routing among them. Virtuoso's VTTIF component continually infers the communication behavior of the application running in a collection of VMs. The combination of overlays like VNET and inference frameworks like VTTIF has great potential to increase the performance, with no user or developer involvement, of existing, unmodified applications by adapting their virtual environments to the underlying computing infrastructure to best suit the applications. We show here how to use the continually inferred application topology and traffic to dynamically control three mechanisms of adaptation, VM migration, overlay topology, and forwarding to significantly increase the performance of two classes of applications, bulk synchronous parallel applications and transactional web ecommerce applications.

As part of an ongoing effort to understand ease of use of digital home technologies, we undertook an exploratory study of people who use their home networks for more than just broadband Internet access. In particular, we wanted to understand the overhead, or problem-time, people spent with their home network devices. As expected, we saw issues of broken hardware and broken software. We also found that problems are often caused by broken expectations, a mismatch between what a person expects to be able to do and specific device capabilities. In this paper we explore broken expectations in the digital home with examples from our study. These observations suggest further research into the ways user expectations and activities shape the digital home experience.

In recent years, with the growth of home appliance usage and the Internet, networked devices have become more widely used in more diverse applications than ever before. This widespread adoption will require new and novel platforms to abstract the difficulties associated with the exploitation of devices and help overcome the inherent limitations associated with bespoke development. New platforms will need to harness the interactions between devices allowing emergent behaviour to surface, whereby high-level applications are created from lowlevel compositions. Combining the devices we own to create new applications or provide services is challenging and there is a need to reduce the cognitive demands placed on specialists and home users alike. This will allow for better exploitation of devices and provide obvious benefits to the end user. In this paper we present a novel framework for managing devices and their services within home environments. Our approach provides a new perspective and we demonstrate the applicability of our approach using a working prototype to implement an intelligent home environment.

Security and privacy are two major concerns in supporting roaming users across administrative domains. In current practices, a roaming user often uses encrypted tunnels, e.g., Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), to protect the secrecy and privacy of her communications. However, due to its encrypted nature, the traffic flowing through these tunnels cannot be examined and regulated by the foreign network's firewall, which may lead the foreign network widely open to various attacks from the Internet. This threat can be alleviated if the users reveal their traffic to the foreign network or the foreign network reveals its firewall rules to the tunnel endpoints. However, neither approach is desirable in practice due to privacy concerns.

Various home appliances and personal appliances are expected to be connected to the Internet in the near future, and the number of such appliances will become extremely large. The Internet will provide connectivity between nodes running various services and applications, in order to provide new advanced functionality. However, the conventional IP protocol is not expected to be sufficient for connecting these appliances and services, because these future appliances are likely to require their own standardized protocols such as Jini and HAVi. Thus, connectivity cannot be achieved without protocol translation. Also, these appliances may require their own naming scheme, routing algorithm, and mobility/multicast supports. Therefore, it is preferable for these functionalities to be customized according to their respective applications. Since adding new functionalities to the IP protocol is too generic for most applications, we believe that future networks should be customized according to the characteristics of the respective applications.

A rising proportion of the world's population uses, and thus must manage, wireless home networks. Unfortunately, these have evolved using protocols designed for backbone and enterprise networks, which are quite different in scale and character to home networks. We believe this evolution is at the heart of widely observed problems experienced by users operating and using their home networks. In this work we investigate redesign of the home router to exploit the distinct social and physical characteristics of the home.

A number of well-known authentication protocols are considered in the context of next-generation mobile and CE network services. The potential weaknesses of current protocols can be overcome using Zero Knowledge Proof (ZKP) techniques to protect user passwords so an alternative ZKP protocol, SeDiCi 2.0, is described. This offers mutual and also two-factor authentication that is considered more secure against various phishing attempts than existing trusted third party protocols. The suitability of such a ZKP protocol for various CE-based cloud computing applications is demonstrated.

Virtual machine grid computing greatly simplifies the use of widespread computing resources by lowering the level of abstraction, benefiting both resource providers and users. For the user, the Virtuoso middleware that we are developing closely emulates the existing process of buying, configuring and using machines. VNET, a component of Virtuoso, is a simple and efficient layer two virtual network tool that makes these virtual machines appear to be connected to the home network of the user, simplifying network management. Overlays like VNET have great potential as the mechanism for adaptation. Here, we describe our second generation VNET implementation, which includes support for arbitrary topologies and routing, application topology inference, and adaptive control of the overlay. We demonstrate that the performance of unmodified applications, in particular bulk synchronous parallel applications running inside the virtual machines and serviced by VNET, can be significantly (up to a factor of two) enhanced by adapting the VNET topology and forwarding rules on the fly based on intelligent application traffic inference methods. The adaptation scheme requires no knowledge or participation from the user or application developer.

nternet Protocol TV (IPTV) is considered to be the next killer application. With two-way communication capability and point-to-point distribution, each viewer can choose individual programs flexibly and at lower cost. According to a study by the Multimedia Research Group, the number of IPTV subscribers will grow from 4.3 million in 2005 to an estimated 36.8 million by 2009, with a compound annual growth rate of 72 percent, and the IPTV service revenue will increase from $740 million in 2005 to $4.6 billion in 2009, with a compound annual growth rate of 56 percent. Telecommunications service providers are racing to provide IPTV/video on demand (VoD), voice, and data -the so called triple-play services.

The Mobile IP (MIP) protocol for IP version 4 provides continuous Internet connectivity to mobile hosts. However, currently it has some drawbacks in the areas of survivability, performance, interoperability with protocols for providing QoS. We have proposed an alternative protocol, Mobile IP with Location Registers (MIP-LR), which overcomes some of these drawbacks and is closer to the "service node" database approach used in the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN): before launching a packet to the mobile host, the sender first queries a database, called the Home Location Register (HLR), to obtain the recipient's current location. MIP-LR is designed for operation in enterprise environments or within logical administrative domains.

The key issue of multimedia systems in home network environment is interoperability among different kinds of multimedia devices. And, as for multimedia content providers outside a home, another issue of multimedia systems in home network environment is how to provide the multimedia service from the outside of a home. We developed a UPnP AV architectural multimedia system with a home gateway powered by the OSGi platform, which gives interoperability among multimedia home devices in home network environment, and a powerful tool for multimedia content providers to provide smarter multimedia service for users in a home 1 .

This article rcports on the performance of audio, video, multimedia, and othcr high-datarate in-home networking applications. Thc article starts by describing the pioblems encountered in power linc communication channcls in terms of frequency response and noise characteristics, and explains how in-home power line LANs can he cxtended to the neighborhood transformer.

This paper describes an investigation into the potential for remote controlled operation of home automation systems. It considers problems with their implementation, discusses possible solutions through various network technologies and indicates how to optimize the use of such systems. The home is an eternal, heterogeneous, distributed computing environment, which certainly requires a careful study before developing any suitable Home Automation

The home IT environment is one the most promising areas for telecom operators. Nowadays, home area networks (HAN) are composed of a variety of heterogeneous devices, such as computers, webcams, sensors, set-top-boxes, etc. A key element in a HAN is the home gateway: a device managing the different networks in the home environment. But the management of this environment is a complex task, with an increasing number of heterogeneous devices interconnected. This paper proposes the application of the ''autonomic communications" paradigm to this problem. Under this paradigm, each device has the intelligence for accomplishing the self-* functionalities: self-configuration, self-optimization, self-healing and self-protection.

We introduce the concept of ''On Demand Connectivity Sharing'', which we build on top of User-Provided Networks (UPNs). UPNs were recently proposed as a new connectivity paradigm, according to which home-users share their broadband Internet connection with roaming guests. We enhance this paradigm with incentives, rules and policies, based on which: (i) home-users provide on-demand connectivity only (i.e., they do not explicitly allocate a portion of their bandwidth) and (ii) guest-users utilize resources that remain unexploited from the respective home-users.

The HomeRF 1 Working Group (WG) is a consortium of over 100 companies from the computer, telecommunications, and consumer electronics industries. This group has developed an open specification called the Shared Wireless Access Protocol -Cordless Access (SWAP-CA) that enables radio frequency (RF) wireless connectivity between a diverse set of devices and computing resources in and around a typical home. Built around an RF spectrum with worldwide availability, SWAP-CA includes operational support for both managed and ad hoc network of devices. It combines and extends wireless networking and cordless telephony into a single unified protocol allowing mobile devices to communicate via both voice and data traffic simultaneously over the Internet and/or over the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). For battery-operated devices it includes a power management mechanism that ensures connection longevity. The technology has been specifically optimized for consumer applications and price points and consequently the HomeRF WG has the broad backing of the major corporate stakeholders interested in enabling tether less networking within the home.

User satisfaction is a key factor in the success of novel multimedia services. Yet, to enable service providers and network operators to control and maximize the quality (QoS, QoE) of delivered video streams, quite some challenges remain. In this paper, we particularly focus on three of them. First of all, objectively measuring video quality requires appropriate quality metrics and methods of assessing them in a real-time fashion. Secondly, the recent Scalable Video Coding (SVC) format opens opportunities for adapting video to the available (network) resources, yet the appropriate configuration of video encoding as well as real-time streaming adaptation are largely unaddressed research areas. Thirdly, while bandwidth reservation mechanisms in access/core networks do exist, service providers lack a means for guaranteeing QoS in the increasingly complex home networks (which they are not in full control of). In this paper we offer a broad view on these interrelated issues, by presenting the developments originating in a Flemish research project (including proof-of-concept demonstrations). From a developmental perspective, we propose an architecture combining a real-time video quality monitoring platform, onthe-fly adaptation (optimizing the video quality) and QoS reservation in a heterogeneous home network based on UPnP QoS v3. From a research perspective, we propose a new subjective test procedure that revealed user preference for temporal scalability over quality scalability. In addition, an extensive study on optimizing HD SVC encoding in IPTV scenarios with fluctuating bandwidth showed that under certain bandwidth constraints (prohibiting sufficient fidelity) spatial scalability is a better option than quality scalability.

This paper presents a piecewise framework for network awareness service (NAS) for wireless/mobile pervasive computing. We investigate how piecewise consideration of wired and wireless elements of the framework architecture benefits service advertisement and discovery and network-awareness techniques. We also discuss scalability of the NAS framework with respect to platform computing capabilities. The framework is suitable for a wide range of computing devices, from powerful ones with multi-tasking operating systems (OS) to small ones with lightweight OS. Case studies applying the NAS framework to sensor monitoring in home networks and data streaming in pervasive multimedia computing are presented. The analytical results on the performance of the NAS framework in these case studies show that it has significant advantages over traditional network-awareness frameworks in terms of reducing wireless bandwidth consumption and saving battery energy of mobile devices.