IEEE Draft Standard for a Convergent Digital Home Network for Heterogeneous Technologies

The standard defines an abstraction layer for multiple home networking technologies. The abstraction layer provides a common data and control Service Access Point to the heterogeneous home networking technologies described in the following specifications: IEEE P1901, IEEE 802.11, IEEE 802.3 and MoCA 1.1. The standard is extendable to work with other home networking technologies.The abstraction layer supports dynamic interface selection for transmission of packets arriving from any interface (upper protocol layers or underlying network technologies). End-to-end Quality of Service (QoS) is supported.Also specified are procedures, protocols and guidelines to provide a simplified user experience to add devices to the network, to set up encryption keys, to extend the network coverage, and to provide network management features to address issues related to neighbor discovery, topology discovery, path selection, QoS negotiation, and network control and management.