Reliable architecture for heterogeneous home-networks: The OMEGA I-MAC approach

Home networks are becoming more and more popular. Today's state of the art is that several different technologies like WLAN, Powerline-Communications (PLC), Ethernet etc. are being used concurrently to connect the home devices. If any connection fault happens the communication stops and new connectivity has to be established manually or, after the system has detected the fault-situation, automatically. Since the detection of the fault can last several seconds it reduces the “Quality of Experience” dramatically since interesting or important transmission can be disturbed. Therefore reliability of transmission is a necessary precondition to fulfilcustomers' expectations. In our approach we suggest an additional protocol layer - we call it layer 2.5 - that manages any available connectivity and automatically choses a new connection with the correct properties e.g. HDTV stream. It balances load situations and can also be used to intelligently distribute traffic between nodes. The system has been proven to work in standard LINUX kernel implementation with a speed up to approximately 1 Gb/s and with an extreme low latency. The topology control and signalling components have been implemented in LINUX user space and work on best effort bases. Within this paper we will outline the architectural considerations and show the initial results. The work has been used as the starting point for a new IEEE standardization, i.e. IEEE1905.1. This group started with the OMEGA I-MAC architecture that will be described here. The work described here has received funding from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement n0.213311 also referred to as OMEGA.