Digital Home Networking

Romain Carbou, Michel Diaz, Ernesto Exposito, Rodrigo Roman, Romain Carbou, Michel Diaz, Ernesto Exposito, Rodrigo Roman

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781848213210
• eBook ISBN: 9781118602980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Electrical Engineering & Telecommunications
• Index: Technology & Engineering

In an era of ubiquity, nomadism and ecological challenge, the maturity of wireless technologies, the readiness of broadband Internet access and the popularity of smart terminals should contribute to emancipating IT services in connection with the home and home-based resources. This book, in light of several years of applied research and technological surveys, aims at describing the digital home networking environment, its techniques, and the challenges around its service architecture.

Digital Home Networking aims to provide a broad introduction to state-of-the-art digital home standards and protocols, as well as an in-depth description of service architectures for entertainment and domotic services involving digital home resources. The book covers aspects such as networking, remote access, security, interoperability, scalability and Quality of Service. Notably, it describes the generic architecture, which was proposed and developed in the context of the EUREKA/Celtic research project "Feel@Home".

Chapter 1

Introduction 1

1.1. Cultural context around a definition

The transformation of our lives, thanks to the “digital revolution” over recent decades, is something challenging to talk about in general terms, without sounding irremediably naive.

Indeed, the successive appearance on the mass market of such technologies as the personal computer (PC) in the late 1970s, mobile telecommunication networks in the 1980s, and, as the most prominent aspect of the public Internet, the World Wide Web in the early 1990s has drastically changed our relationship with space, time, and access to information. As is well known, this addition of technological revolutions simply built a new paradigm in the way we behave and live together in the global village. Very few areas of human activity could be considered not to have been impacted by the possibilities offered by the digital era: retrieving information, communicating with friends, and purchasing goods on a marketplace are some of the most trivial examples of the extent to which our daily life has been drastically modified within one human generation.

Such means of communication also have unexpected consequences in the area of sociology. Blogs, forums, “walls” of social networks – these various forms of the Web 2.0 – have led people to become gradually the “online script-writers” of their own existence, thereby giving to private events of their existence an exposure hitherto unseen with such spontaneity.

In line with this, the multiple existing communication channels yielding opportunities to meet new people and to develop social networks have produced a semantic “new deal” around several key aspects of human relations, among which friendship appears undoubtedly as the most spectacular example. Indeed, if [HEL 09] “Friendship […] is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other’s sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy”, one could hardly admit that such – classical – a definition reflects the characteristics of friendship as practiced on Facebook or any other social network. Anyone having some online exposure on social networks has experienced the situation of becoming the “digital friend” of a colleague, the person on the table next to them at the restaurant during their last holiday, a vague “friend of a friend”, an occasional tennis partner, and so on.

However, this semantic shift, if admitted in these common, day-to-day interactions with people, can still refer back to a more conservative social norm regarding our willingness to open the home to this cloud of loose friendly connections. Just assess which percentage of friends belonging to your favourite social network would you invite home for real – either for the genuine pleasure of having them enjoy your authentic scallops in a mushroom julienne, or, conversely, to ask them for a little help next Sunday to remove a ton of rubble from the cellar.

Nonetheless, one should not underestimate how the day-to-day immersion of the individual in the digital ecosystem can bolster interactions among people in the physical world – either in evident, natural formats of social links (seeking an affective relationship or attending a job interview) or throughout totally new and spontaneous sociological phenomena, illustrated by flash mobs, freeze parties, or monster T.G.I.F1. But these latter examples, noticeably enough, happen in public places.

And precisely, by contrast, they raise the following question: Are the social criteria to get invited in the very sanctuary of one’s home, significantly different from what they were in the last century, in each given culture? An extensive answer, which would call for both a segmented analysis and a continuous observation over time, is far beyond the objective of the present book. However, once an acceptable definition of the “digital home” itself has been proposed hereafter in the chapter, we will see how it is equally, if not more, affected by new societal paradigms, in terms of trust and privacy.

Just as the notion of a friend has been irreversibly shaken by the growing popularity of online social networks, similarly, on geographic and professional grounds, the home and the office are gradually becoming more and more entwined in some “yin-yang” pattern. The modern worker, proverbially, always keeps a bit of the office with him when back home – and vice versa. In this regard, defining the formal borders of the “digital home” ecosystem will be a question, subject to spatial and systemic conventions, which is not that obvious.

To sketch an intuitive definition, the “digital home” suggests an addition of digital equipment, hardware, computers, sensors, devices, with a capacity to communicate and to interact, either with users or through machine-to-machine interfaces, aimed at delivering services and, above all, bound to the physical place, called home, where a family, or an individual, or a group of people lives. Now, would a smartphone used to remotely access home resources still be considered part of the “digital home” ecosystem? Is the car part of the digital home? And so on, for my professional laptop, used occasionally to store temporarily a set of pictures from my last holiday? Not only ubiquity, but also nomadism, as structuring patterns of contemporary life, and the overlapping of private/professional usages in a single device, strongly hinders a spontaneous and objective delimitation of the boundaries of a digital home.

1.2. A brief history of home automation

1.2.1. Stay naive and humble

Technological predictions often meet with contrasting levels of acceptance by communities. Evoking the practical, physical feasibility of a particular innovation always yields as many cautious reactions as enthusiastic ones among experts, yet referring to a common epistemological background and state-of-the-art references. One noticeably fierce modern debate illustrating this syndrome, in the late 1970s, concerned nothing but the very possibility of cellular telecommunications networks, at a merely theoretical level! In that period, a claim, announced during a famous scientific popularization program (“Temps X”, France, 1979–1989), about the likelihood of the appearance in the very near future of a mass market mobile service, had led the head of a public telecommunications research agency to call the TV producer and demand public apologies for broadcasting such nonsense!

Quite similarly, in the economic sphere, business model forecasting has always had a complex relationship with the history of underlying technologies, alternating between the utmost narrow-mindedness and the sharpest intuition.

In the first category, let us remember that Gutenberg’s printing revolution was primarily, in fact rather exclusively, considered by spiritual powers (and, vicariously, by most governments) as a means of improving the dissemination of the Holy Writ. The innovation rapidly got out of control at an unpredictable level, so far as to bolster the Renaissance movement, a scientific revolution and a knowledge-based economy2. In more recent times, we can also remember how skeptical about the Internet the – then – most influential software company was, until the mid-1990s. On the contrary, in the latter category, futurologists of the early 1970s had remarkably predicted e-commerce usages on home terminals looking exactly like a TV with a keyboard, at a time when neither the PC nor the Videotex standard had been invented.

Precisely, the concept of “digital home” is a peculiar historical subject, both in technological and economic terms. On the one hand, it never encountered a major argumentation or a theoretical hindrance against its practical feasibility, like, for instance, cellular networks did. On the contrary, enabling technologies have been around for several decades. The X10 protocol designed for device/appliance control, using a power line as a communication channel, was designed in 1975 and was soon adopted by such device manufacturers and industry players as BSR, Sears and General Electric. On the other hand, it was steadily and enthusiastically announced as the very next revolution of personal services, though it consistently failed to raise hitherto a mass-market-wide demand.

Are we today in a conjunction with conditions that would eventually help the digital home to become a reality as widely deployed and massively adopted as, say…, telephony services? Can the ongoing convergence of telecom networks bolster this scenario? Just as with printing, flying, or wireless communications, the digital home, understood as a universally accepted service will probably arise from societal, ecologic, demographic, cultural leapfrogs calling for a pervasive, ubiquitous necessity to monitor, control, and share home resources in any situation. In other words, will the digital home, a mature-enough technical reality (if one omits the noticeably large number of legacy devices, up to today, with no native controlling interface), find its own path of appropriation. The present book will try to show some possible factors that may – at last? – influence the emancipation of the digital home era.

1.2.2. Terminology around domotics

The term “domotics” (an entry surprisingly absent from referential English dictionaries) is considered as a synonym for “home automation”. The latter is defined [TFD 10a] in the following way: “[…] a field within building automation, specializing in the specific automation requirements of private homes and in the application of automation techniques for the comfort and security of its residents. Although many techniques used in building automation (such as light and climate control, control of doors and window shutters, security and surveillance systems, etc.) are also used in home automation, additional functions in home automation can include the control of multimedia home entertainment systems, automatic plant watering and pet feeding, automatic scenes for dinners and parties, and a more user-friendly control interface”.

In the same source [TFD 10b], “domotics”, derived from the Latin “domus” (home) and standing for “DOMus infOrmaTICS” is itself defined in a pretty equivalent way: “Information technology in the home […]. Although remote lighting and appliance control have been used for years […], domotics is another term for the digital home, including the networks and devices that add comfort and convenience as well as security. Controlling heating, air conditioning, food preparation, TVs, stereos, lights, appliances, entrance gates and security systems all fall under the domotics umbrella”. This alternative definition suggests that the “digital home” would actually be nothing but another synonym for “domotics”. In the next section we will propose a slight distinction between, on the one hand, the field of activity/engineering and the development of techniques (home automation/ domotics) and, on the other hand, its particular embodiment in devices, software, sensors, appliances, network entities, constituting the digital home ecosystem, per se.

1.2.3. A bit of history

The myth of an automated home, featured with “intelligent” appliances, is hard to date objectively. Jacques Tati’s satirical movie, Mon Oncle, shot between 1956 and 1957, used as its main set the famous “Villa Arpel”, a “modern” building with a remote control to switch on/off the garden fountain and, not less unforgettable, a futuristic kitchen, stuffed with monitoring LED and alarms surrounding the cooker, suggesting the kind of “interactivity” that digital home facilities may propose. Home automation really became a field for applied research in the 1970s, with the concomitant development of data network technologies capable of proposing a (unidirectional) programming interface for appliances (X10) and the earliest forms of PCs (Altair 8080, TRS-80, and much later the Apple II, and all their successors).

The 1980s,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Actors in Digital Home Networking
• Chapter 3: Network Technologies
• Chapter 4: Standards
• Chapter 5: Personalization and Home Context
• Chapter 6: Security
• Chapter 7: Quality of Experience and Quality of Service
• Chapter 8: Service Management
• Chapter 9: The Feel@Home System
• Chapter 10: Home Interconnection through the Internet
• Chapter 11: Conclusion
• List of Authors
• Index
• Websites