An integrated home server for communication, broadcast reception, and home automation

This paper presents a home server platform integrating the functions of communication, digital broadcasting reception, and home automation applications. The home server has a processing module of high performance to process software task, and a multimedia decoding module as a peripheral component interconnect slave device to decode the audio and the vide data compressed in various formats, and a home automation module to provide home control services, and a MPEG2 transport stream (TS) distributor to convey simultaneously three high definition television (HDTV) channels which may go their way from terrestrial, satellite, and cable tuners to the next destination via home network. For an implementation of this integrated home sever we have had to manipulate the video and audio paths from processing module, home automation module and tuner modules to display the selected one, on HDTV set. In order to convey Internet protocol television (IPTV) traffic through this integrated home server a QoS-enabled Ethernet switch is mounted to the processing module.