A broadcasting enabled Residential Gateway for Next Generation Networks

To date, broadcasting traffic data represents a low percentage of the total traffic in the Internet when compared to other kinds of information. This may be caused by difficulties with multicast transmissions (i.e filtering by ISPs), low bandwidth rates in the last mile access, quality of service (QoS) and the use of Network Address Translation (NAT) boxes in SME's and home offices (SOHOs). Research efforts in Next Generation Networks (NGN) are under way to create networks with true triple-play capabilities to overcome these problems. Several standardisation bodies like ITU-T and ETSI have working groups aimed at developing a general NGN architecture able to transport any type of traffic with an associated QoS. There are several results available (for example, ETSI TISPAN has published its Release 1) but there is still on-going work on different subjects, such as broadcasting transport in NGNs, where ETSI TISPAN has approved the study of IPTV in NGN as a high priority issue. This article focuses on the problems and solutions of a flexible, easily upgradeable broadcast enabled RGW (Residential Gateway) designed to work in an NGN scenario where multicast traffic, NAT boxes and QoS must be taken into consideration.