Digital Home Networking

Chapter 9

The Feel@Home System

9.1. The Feel@Home architecture

The objective of the Feel@Home project was to build a system able to make applications capable of accessing a given set of personal multimedia contents stored at home, both at anytime and from anywhere. To achieve this purpose, there are many possible technical implementations, such as the ones using IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), Virtual Private Network (VPN), or P2P. In any case, independently of the implementation, a common architecture has to be defined.

The first design step is to select what actions/functions a user of the Feel@Home applications should be able to perform. The actions and applications that have been selected for the users are:

• – to access home multimedia contents while being at home;
• – to access home multimedia contents from outside home;
• – to share home multimedia contents with family and friends;
• – to access different services; and
• – to share these services.

Furthermore, a user should be able to control the configuration of all Feel@Home applications, and modify his/her profile information and preferences.

Security is also an important feature for such applications to avoid misuse of confidential data or to prevent the access of non-allowed users to private contents. Furthermore, Quality of Service (QoS) has to be taken into account and included in the architecture to offer a good Quality of Experience (experience of use) in all cases: being intra-home and from outside home. Figure 9.1 shows ...