Digital Home Networking

Chapter 11

Conclusion

The purpose of this book is to present what a digital home is now and what it could become in the near future, as it could turn out to be one of the most important networks for our everyday life.

Toward this goal, the initial chapters have given the definition of:

• – the main actors of the digital home and of its network, i.e. the users (e.g. family and friends) and the operators (e.g. Internet Service Provider (ISP) and mobile operators);
• – the main home functions, e.g. the main devices and services;
• – the main digital home network technologies and the corresponding home network standards, e.g. UPnP (Universal Plug and Play), DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance), HGI (Home Gateway Initiative), and ZigBee.

After this basic environment, the home context and the home personalization have been presented, including a few of its main objects and explaining context management and context sharing. Furthermore, as the definition of the addressed objects must be precisely expressed, a clear semantics of them and of their relationships, based on ontologies, is proposed, which allows the users to use a set of already defined tools needed for automatically handling these semantics.

The next chapter addresses a quite important aspect, i.e. security, and successively discusses the importance of security and privacy, what are the security requirements for the digital home, proposes a conceptual security architecture, and discusses the main security properties and solutions ...