Intark Han

An integrated home server for communication, broadcast reception, and home automation

This paper presents a home server integrating communication, digital broadcast reception, and home automation applications. The home server has a CPU of high performance, and an MPEG decoder as a PCI slave device, and a MPEG2 TS distributor to convey simultaneously three HDTV channels which may go their way from terrestrial, satellite, and cable tuners to the next destination equipment via Ethernet port and PCI bus. We also present the architecture of MPEG2 TS distributor.

A network level power management for home network devices

This paper proposes a network level power management based on the energy-aware plug and play (EPnP) for home network devices. The power management can reduce the power consumption of devices by reconfiguring power control elements of each device depending on a service collaborating with many devices in the home network. It also can reduce the power consumption of devices without user intervention by the EPnP technique. It can maximize a power reduction by a fine grain power control based on the power control elements that are functional elements of a device which is related with a specific home network service. The proposed power management showed that it was very effective when a service works together with many devices that have multi-function in ubiquitous home environment .

Service-oriented power management for an integrated multi-function home server

A home server usually is an integrated system of communication, broadcast, game, media center, and home automation. It is a kind of a multi-function all-in-one system. The home server should be turned on for all day long because it plays a role of network hub, multimedia contents server, and home automation controller. Therefore it is necessary to reduce its power consumption to lower the operational cost. To achieve this power reduction, this paper proposes service-oriented power management method for an integrated multi-function home server. This method classifies the resources of the home server into small functional blocks according to the kind of service and turns on only the resources needed for the requested services. When a new service is requested only necessary resources are turned on. And when a service exit occurs, unnecessary resources are turned off. This power management greatly reduces a waste of power dissipation. We also present some scenarios utilizing this

An Implementation of the Broadband Home Gateway supporting Multi-Channel IPTV Service

Home gateway (HG), called residential gateway (RG) in other words, is a device that interconnects various home electronic devices to one another as well as connects these private home network devices to exterior public network. There are various types of digital home services in IP (Internet protocol)-based home network system; data service, entertainment service, security service, home automation service and so on. Multimedia related service, especially IPTV (Internet protocol television) service, is the attractive one to customer in these home network services. In this paper, we show the implementation of the broadband home gateway supporting multi-channel IPTV service. The proposed and implemented home gateway has an architecture that can provide multi-channel, more than three channels, HD (high definition) class IPTV service with 20 Mbps (megabits per second) bandwidth for each channel. For the improved IPTV service using IP multicast, the proposed HG uses Internet group multicast protocol (IGMP) proxy and IGMP snooping protocol. The proposed HG consists of two main components, system processor for NAT (network address translation) processing and system software functions and an L2 (layer 2) Ethernet switch to interface access network and network distribution in intra-home network. The multicast packets for the multi channel IPTV service go from ingress port for access network interface to egress ports for home network directly based on L2 multicast MAC (medium access control) table in L2 Ethernet switch without via the system processor of the HG. This paper specifies in detail the system structure and implementation of hardware, firmware and software for the proposed HG

Four-way Video Conference in Home Server for Digital Home

This paper presents a method to provide four-way video conferencing of 640times480 graphics resolution in the home server integrating the functions of high speed communication, digital broadcasting reception, and home automation applications. The home server has been designed to have the functionality of IP, terrestrial and cable STB imbedded so that it possesses a multimedia decoding module as a PCI (peripheral component interconnect) slave device to decode the audio and the video data compressed in various formats. In addition, we add a special video conference module having audio/video codec, screen divider, and audio mixer. A session manager of application program initiates and controls the additive sessions necessary in the course of participant addition from two-way, three-way to four-way. The session control is based on SIP protocol located in the processing module of the home server. The audio/video streams from each party are decoded in the video conference module. The decoded video streams are displayed on the screen divided spatially. The spatially divided video is encoded in the MPEG encoder of the video conference module and sent to destinations. The audio streams from each party are mixed so that four different mixed streams from the mixer go back to each destination with the spatially divided video. The media decoding module receives the spatially divided video and the mixed audio in formats of ITU-R 656 and I2S respectively from the video conference module

QoS-adjustable home gateway for IPTV service

We propose a home gateway architecture for an IPTV service that has QoS management functionality. This home gateway contains a multicast packet classifier and a priority regenerator that can handle multiple IPTV traffics concurrently. In order to provide IPTV service with QoS in a home network, we also design an IPTV channel zapping manager that communicates coincidently with a home network QoS manager.

ZigBee-based IR remote control repeater and its control message frame format

Many legacy consumer devices are controlled via IR remote controls. A user needs one IR remote control per one legacy consumer device and has to guarantee the line of sight towards legacy consumer devices. As the ubiquitous home era emerges, all home devices are required to be controllable at anytime and anywhere. To control IR-based legacy consumer devices regardless of the line of sight, a small ZigBee-based IR remote control repeater is attached near the IR receiving part of a legacy consumer device. It receives the control message via ZigBee protocol and converts the received message into IR signal which is transmitted to the legacy consumer device. To be available for any IR-based consumer device without any modification, it should be made universal and generalized. In this paper we propose the IR remote control repeater and the control message frame format applicable to all types of IR-based legacy consumer devices.

Four-way Video Conference and its Session Control Based on Distributed Mini-MCU in Home Server

This paper presents a method to provide four-way video conference by distributing MCU (Multi-point Control Unit) to one of home network equipments like home server. The distributed mini-MCU consists of a special video conference module and a session manager to initiate and control the additive sessions based on SIP protocol. The media streams from each party are collected and mixed in the video conference module of the home server operating as SIP UAC (User Agent Client). The spatially divided video and three different mixed audio are encoded in MPEG-4 encoders and sent back to participants of SIP UAS (User Agent Server). Based on this mini-MCU, it is possible to provide video conference without any centralized MCUs while maintaining the network bandwidth reduced.

User-Configurable Personalized Mosaic Electronic Program Guide

An electronic program guide (EPG) has been developed to help a viewer discover his preferred program more easily. Furthermore, more advanced and user-friendly EPG, mosaic EPG, emerged. It displays split screens simultaneously showing a variety of live broadcast programs and enables a viewer to easily select his preferred program. But this mosaic EPG screen is predetermined by broadcast providers. Therefore a viewer cannot configure a personalized mosaic EPG screen according to his interests. To overcome this disadvantage, we propose user-configurable mosaic EPG attainable on the set-top box of a viewer. We consider a set- top box equipped with two tuners, the one for displaying and the other for recording. This set-top box can record any selected program on the storage via the second tuner. If a viewer configures his favorite programs, the set-top box starts to record the programs one by one repeatedly for a predetermined time interval. A personalized mosaic EPG can be realized when these stored programs are put together. Because the stored programs will be updated continuously, a viewer can watch the almost live mosaic EPG screen configured according to his preference. The proposed method can provide a user-configurable personalized mosaic EPG without any assistance from broadcast providers.

Ftth residential gateway And IP tuner for IPTV service

We propose a residential gateway architecture for IPTV service that has QoS management functionality. The proposed residential gateway contains a multicast packet classifier and a priority regenerator that can handle multiple IPTV traffics concurrently. We also implement an IP tuner for an IP settop box that can extract MPEG streams from IP packets and has the same role as a legacy tuner of a digital TV settop box. In order to provide IPTV service with QoS in a home network, we design an IPTV channel zapping manager that communicates coincidently with a home network QoS manager.