Monday, January 09, 2006

Informal Discussion Panel Lunch

Title: The Connected Home Network

• Venue: An informal lunch discussion. Each panel member opens with a 1-2 minute statement of key issues, questions, and/or topics for discussion. The moderator then leads a Q&A between panel members and also from the audience. A computer projector is optionally available for showing demos/screen shots.
  
  Abstract:
  
  The historical situation with CE devices was that each device stood alone and was interfaced to external "pipes". However, with the growth of high speed internet services, multiple computers households, and the desire to share peripherals (e.g. printers); there has been a rapid deployment of home networks using wired and wireless in-home technologies. These in home networks well serve the original purpose of facilitating delay insensitive whole house internet connectivity; however, they fall short of supporting the demands of delay sensitive higher bandwidth audio/video traffic.
  
  The next generation home network will need to evolve in multiple dimensions in order to meet expected future market demands:
• Wider bandwidth to support multiple HD video, high quality audio, and voice telephony
• QoS to support priority assignments to traffic streams
• Autodiscovery, self configuration, and self healing to facilitate mass market adoption
• Reliability needed to support building automation and security services
• Conditional access and rights management to support highly valued entertainment content
• Security
  
  Our panel will discuss the current state of the art, explore the open issues, and share their ideas on the roadmap for development of next generation home networks.

Pizza and beverages will be served in N259/N261 at 12:30 PM. Join us for an informal gathering before the discussion begins!