Phone-Controlled Delivery of NGN Services into Residential Environments

The horizontally layered architecture of the IMS/NGN standards family enables the delivery of services independent of access network and requesting device. In this article, the authors propose a further separation of service control and delivery, allowing the requesting device – in particular a user's mobile phone – to invite other devices (we will focus on DLNA appliances) into the service delivery, enhancing both user experience and service design flexibility. The proposed solution builds on exploiting proximity technologies (e.g. barcodes, NFC) for pairing the control device with a remote environment. Motivated by scenarios, the architecture concepts are explained and a prototype that was implemented for validation is described. Selected findings and a short overview of related standardization efforts conclude the paper.