Andreas Häber

Phone-Controlled Delivery of NGN Services into Residential Environments

The horizontally layered architecture of the IMS/NGN standards family enables the delivery of services independent of access network and requesting device. In this article, the authors propose a further separation of service control and delivery, allowing the requesting device – in particular a users mobile phone – to invite other devices (we will focus on DLNA appliances) into the service delivery, enhancing both user experience and service design flexibility. The proposed solution builds on exploiting proximity technologies (e.g. barcodes, NFC) for pairing the control device with a remote environment. Motivated by scenarios, the architecture concepts are explained and a prototype that was implemented for validation is described. Selected findings and a short overview of related standardization efforts conclude the paper.

Remote Service Usage Through Sip with Multimedia Access as a Use Case

The IP multimedia subsystem is under deployment, as an IP-based service control and access infrastructure, but how it interconnects with residential appliances is currently unclear. With IMS access for the residential appliances they can be used as both service consumers and service providers. In this paper we present a protocol which allows residential services to be remotely invoked, through the IMS, and consumed in a different network, along with a prototype implementation and early results. With our protocol services of two distinct service protocol systems can cooperate.

Virtualization of Remote Devices and Services in Residential Networks

Lately solutions for remote access for residential services have been proposed. However, these solutions require modifications to the service controllers. In addition, remote access adds complexity to the client application. We propose here a solution for decoupling remote access from the client itself with an entity that creates virtual instances of remote services in a local network. Thereby, clients will be able to discover the virtual instance and use it. Moreover, client applications do not need to distinguish between local and remote services hence reducing complexity.

Media Delivery to Remote Renderers Controlled by the Mobile Phone

In todays content delivery solutions, service delivery and control are still tightly coupled, a service typically being delivered to the same device that controls the session. We present a solution that was designed with the goal to decouple service control and delivery. Using our approach, multimedia streaming services can be delivered to off-the-shelf DLNA devices in visited networks. The service provider receives information about the remote media player and access environment via a mobile phone. Proximity technologies (e.g. barcodes, NFC) of the control device are used for the exchange of required credentials. This paper describes a typical scenario and our prototype implementation.

Delivering Services to Residential Appliances by Utilizing Remote Resource Awareness

Service providers are nowadays offering a variety of services, and in particular multimedia content delivery. Besides, consumer appliances are increasingly becoming digitalized including support for communication networks. However, it is difficult, and in many cases impossible, to use these services with standard consumer appliances, such as TV and media player devices. Rather, usage is often restricted so that they can only be accessed through web browsers from PCs, mobile phones and similar terminals. This is unfortunate, because dedicated consumer appliances are often better suited to handle the content and thereby give consumers a better experience. Within this paper, three design approaches that support such services are described and compared, along with a prototype that shows this concept.