Design of Home Network Gateway for Real-Time A/V Streaming between IEEE1394 and Ethernet

For practical multimedia streaming services in home networks, seamless binding between two stream formats (digital video (DV) and MPEG-4), on two heterogeneous protocols (IEEE 1394 and Ethernet), is required. IEEE 1394 is the best way for the real-time transmission of high bandwidth audio/video (A/V) content inside a home, and Ethernet provides a connection to anywhere, not only in homes, but also outside by using wired or wireless mobile solutions, however, because of differences between the two stream solutions (DV-IEEE 1394 and MPEG-4-Ethernet), an appropriate device or function is needed between the two parts. In this paper, the software and hardware architecture of a media gateway are suggested in order to solve the problems. First, hardware architecture was designed to support transcoding functions between DV and MPEG-4 in real-time. It also solves resource limitations between two protocols and related devices such as bandwidth and quality factors. Suggested software architecture coordinates the heterogeneity of transaction management and addressing mechanisms between two protocols. Based on the design requirements of the proposed system, we implemented a prototype media gateway based on the proposed architecture and the performance was evaluates being successful.