Digital Home Networking

Chapter 10

Home Interconnection through the Internet

10.1. Introduction

The previous chapters have presented how multimedia content sharing and, more generally, remote access to a home network can be deployed on an IMS- or VPN-based framework. But albeit these two architectures can be provided by telecommunications companies, they are not yet widely deployed in the Internet. The first one, specific to telecommunications operators, is mainly deployed in the context of Voice over IP services (as we have seen yet it can be easily adapted to enable a remote access service, with numerous advantages). The second is well known and constitutes a robust solution as well, yet at the cost of the number of VPN servers to deploy, so as to fit well with the Internet scale.

The goal of this chapter is twofold:

• – first, to explain how the Feel@Home project has solved interoperability issues between VPN and IMS in order to adapt these solutions to various operators;
• – second, to present a solution proposed recently, even closer to Internet architecture principles, based on HTTP, and, likewise, interoperable.

10.2. Interoperability scenarios

The Feel@Home project has specified and developed two different technical approaches to implement the remote access and sharing services: IMS-based and VPN-based. These approaches correspond to two different solutions fostered by operators, but they are anyway in the network and thereby not seen by the customer. So, in order to complete the implementation ...