An integrated solution for home automation

The increasing diffusion of home area networks (HANs), intended for the delivery of multimedia contents (e.g. TV programs, movies, music) as well as home automation data (e.g. household appliances, lighting and surveillance controls), represents a new challenge for networking. However, at present, most of the available domotic and building automation solutions provide single answers to the market requirements, and their heterogeneousness makes very hard an integration process. In this paper, a project for an integrated solution is presented, based on both commercial and customized devices developed ad-hoc. Since the convergence of many traditional services over IP-based infrastructures drastically increases the amount of IP data traffic to be delivered to the users, questions about the Quality of Service management arise and must be taken into account.