IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics, Vol. 52, No. 1, FEBRUARY 2006 Manuscript received January 9, 2006 0098 3063/06/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE 104 An Integrated Home Server for Communication, Broadcast Reception, and Home Automation Intark Han, Hong-Shik Park, Youn-Kwae Jeong, and Kwang-Roh Park Abstract — This paper presents a home server platform integrating the functions of communication, digital broadcasting reception, and home automation applications. The home server has a processing module of high performance to process software task, and a multimedia decoding module as a peripheral component interconnect slave device to decode the audio and the vide data compressed in various formats, and a home automation module to provide home control services, and a MPEG2 transport stream (TS) distributor to convey simultaneously three high definition television (HDTV) channels which may go their way from terrestrial, satellite, and cable tuners to the next destination via home network. For an implementation of this integrated home sever we have had to manipulate the video and audio paths from processing module, home automation module and tuner modules to display the selected one on HDTV set. In order to convey Internet protocol television (IPTV) traffic through this integrated home server a QoS-enabled Ethernet switch is mounted to the processing module 1 . Index Terms — Integrated home server, multimedia decoder, IPTV, home network, home automation I. INTRODUCTION Recent development of home network technology brings the harsh competition among various product domains including home gateway (HG), personal computer (PC), set-top box (STB), game console and home automation system (HAS). HG is the new equipment resulting from today’s home network technology. It connects the external access network and the internal heterogeneous home networks and delivers the services to the home network environments [1]. A digital subscriber loop (DSL) modem with some Ethernet ports is an example of primitive home gateway which terminates layer 2 of the access network and coverts L2 services to the home network. Today a typical DSL modem having wireless access point is widely spread in the home network market. But it needs multiple public IP addresses when more two PCs are connected to this device at the same time. To solve the shortage of Internet protocol (IP) address, layer 3 functions like packet forwarding are included into HG, such a HG is called home router. The home router is operated based on IPv4 and IPv6 simultaneously. Firewall, web-based management and proxy of signaling protocol for session control are core components which should be included into HG [2-3]. 1 This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Information and Communication, Republic of Korea under Grant No. 05MH2310. Intark Han is with ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), Daejeon, Korea (e-mail: ithan@etri.re.kr). Hong-Shik Park is a professor of ICU (Information and Communications University), Daejeon, Korea (e-mail: hspark@icu.ac.kr). Youn-Kwae Jeong is with ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), Daejeon, Korea (e-mail: ykjeong@etri.re.kr). Kwang-Roh Park is with ETRI (Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute), Daejeon, Korea (e-mail: krpark@etri.re.kr). PC is much more cost-effective to evolve than any other equipment since it has a modular architecture. Specific hardware can be attached as separate units into peripheral component interconnect (PCI) slot. In addition, PC has so strong computing power that it can process multitasking and many different applications. Owing to graphic card, digital video disk (DVD) and hard disk drive (HDD), PC gets to posses the architecture suitable for media center in home network. With this media center, television reception card that has a tuner, a moving picture expert group2 (MPEG2) decoder and an infrared data association (IrDA) receiver for remote control brings an amazing convenience. This media center with DSL modem can be a competitor of HG and STB. Although some have built-in set-top boxes, most television sets require separate STB. The broadcasting technology has been developed from the first step of multi-functional broadcasting where partially interactive program guide, game, weather services are provided, the second step of interactive broadcasting in which interactive channels, pay-per view, remote shopping, games, banking, interactive advertisement services are enjoyed, the third step of Internet connection for web-browsing and e-mail services, and the fourth step of personal video recorder (PVR) device for services of program recording, time shifting, to the last step of home network for services of connection of household appliances, multimedia, and home server. The experts consider home network as the last horizon of STB. This means that STB can also act as an Internet gateway and connect other peripherals such as PCs and voice over IP (VoIP) hardware, although STB is now mostly attached only to the television set. The convergence of digital broadcasting and broadband data services makes the STB a good candidate to lead the home network. The gaming industry has succeeded in making a big pie of business with terrible competition. Today’s game console contains a processor, a hard disk drive, a DVD writable and an Ethernet port. Recently, network games in which multiplayers enjoy gaming via the Internet have been very popular. The game console has more similarities with a PC from a purely functional point of view. In addition, the core component of the console is the processor. The quality of a game console depends on the speed of the processor. Fast processing graphic engine needs to respond to the interaction of game players. With processor speed increased a new device with added functions such as PVR and Internet browsing is foreseen [3]. Home automation system is the equipment enabling the intelligent apartment complex to be linked into a single network and providing the broadband access services, remote control of home information electronic appliances, electronic security services and the Internet video telephony on the single network. Based on this home automation system, every home