Continuing from our last article, the ability to bring your home with you, wherever you might be, is at the heart of home services. For this level of ubiquity to work, the network must have a global span. Unfortunately, one major shortcoming of DLNA is that it’s been designed for LAN use only. However, a number of methods have been devised to remote enable DLNA. They are listed below.

 

Virtually all DLNA-based services in the field, or soon to be deployed, use a CPE gateway with the capability of creating a VPN with the service provider. Two specific examples are Sony’s PlayTV offering and NTT Docomo’s MH2H platform. This method allows effective distribution of content to an arbitrary number of devices within the home and, as we defined, this constitutes N-Play. However, it does not satisfy our requirements for home services since it won’t enable access to the home from outside the home network. A concrete example will make this clear: consider Mike who subscribes to his provider’s digital living service. Mike only needs one set-top for all displays in his house. In addition, sending media from any of his computers to his living room TV was never this easy. But, he will not be able to get his home DVR to stream directly to his friends TV like Tara did.

 

Some might consider this situation as optimal since it lends to subscription models based on number of devices but this is, in fact, a very short sighted view. Having a pervasive network where people can use their media regardless of location can lead to dramatic increases in usage.

 

The same reasons IMS provides a great architecture for IPTV (News - Alert) services also apply to N-Play services. However, a specific feature of IMS that can be leveraged for remote enabling DLNA is that as part of their specification, IMS clients have the ability to create P2P VPN tunnels with other clients. Using this ability IMS can expand the DLNA VPN method described above to allow VPN connections to and from any home including ones on other IMS networks which the provider federates with. At GlobalComm (News - Alert) 2006, Sony demonstrated PlayStation’s DLNA services based on this method. While this expands the VPN method to being pervasive across networks, IMS can provide even more.

 

Ironically IMS, by itself, is a much better system than DLNA for enabling pervasive “digital living”. The only reason we need DLNA is that excluding PacketCable 2.0 set-top boxes and 4G devices, consumer electronics won’t have IMS built in to them any time soon. But with a DLNA to IMS gateway as part of the CPE device, we can convert DLNA in the LAN to IMS calls outside the LAN. This allows federated IMS networks to extend QoS based on a number of conditions such as media type. Even in this scenario remote IMS tunnels could be used, but rather for security. Both methods of remote enabling DLNA fall under the HIGA specification, which is essentially Ericsson’s (News - Alert) creation. It’s worth to note that both TISPAN and the Open IPTV Forum have recommended HIGA as a standard.

 

The major issue with basing home services on IMS is that it’s a real unknown when IMS will gain traction. However, the good news is that none of the proprietary IMS extensions to SIP are needed to make DLNA pervasive. As one of many examples, in Japan, KDDI (News - Alert) has demonstrated successfully a DLNA to SIP proxy under the fitting name of W-DLNA. They and others have shown this method to be viable on any SIP enabled network, including IMS. As can be seen, chances are high that SIP will play a major role in home services. If this market gains traction it will be very likely that a SIP based standard will supersede DLNA for device to device communications and become native to consumer electronics.

 

Now that we have discussed the potential for SIP based home services, let’s examine reasons why FMC carriers have a clear advantage in this space. One is their unique ability to manage contention and bandwidth. In fact, in the coming years, the carrier’s ability to offer QoS across federated networks will only increase thanks to initiatives such as IMS and IPX. QoS will not only be an advantage with regards to reliability, it will also allow carriers to support media with high fidelity. Another advantage is the trust factor. N-Play goes beyond media management to include services such as remotely unlocking front doors and home surveillance (we will discuss these in our next article). Using a managed private network is a clear advantage for security. When considering carriers, keep in mind that cell phones will be an important consumer of home media services and they will be the most important universal remote controls for the connected home.

 

Let’s shift our attention from the provider’s network to the home network. All devices in the connected home will be communications enabled, whether it’s the TV, surveillance cameras or washing machine. This will require a pervasive network in the house as well. If this network requires home retrofitting it will simply not be a viable option. Rather, home services need high bandwidth LANs that work using existing infrastructures. MoCA, or multimedia over coax, is just such a technology and uses the homes existing coaxial cable infrastructure. As examples, Verizon (News - Alert) and AT&T are already using MoCA for their triple-play offerings. In addition, clearly WiFi and other local area wireless standards will remain central to the success of home services as well.

 

In our last article, we introduced the potential market of pervasive home services and media management on an arbitrary number of devices or “N-Play”. In this article we talked about methods service providers can use to overcome the limitations of DLNA and other operational issues. In our next article, we will talk about other classes of potential home services; namely those of home automation, surveillance and energy management.