Towards a convergent digital home network infrastructure

Many communication standards are available to set up consumer home networks. An intelligent combination of wired and wireless communication technologies allows exploiting many technology specific advantages while compensating disadvantages. Such a convergent digital home network infrastructure increases robustness, coverage range and availability of applications and services. In this paper, we discuss the general concept of such home networks. We present the Inter-MAC convergence sublayer as a very first approach to this concept. With the help of a typical scenario we demonstrate its feasibility. The recently initiated standardization activity IEEE P1905.1 is introduced. A global standard for convergent digital home networks can be the basis for a user-friendly network of consumer electronic devices in the home.