The next-generation residential gateway

Economical changes and technical innovations are dramatically transforming the way consumers live. Homes that used to have one or two black telephones now have multiple computers, peripherals like printers and scanners, televisions, stereos, DVD players, VCRs, cordless telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and other electronic devices. The necessity to interconnect these devices and to share common resources gives rise to the home networking concept. Connecting the home network to the Internet was the original rote of an emerging class of devices called residential gateway (RG). This concept will evolve over the next few years from devices that provide basic broadband access to complex integrated services gateways enabling integration of voice, video and data as well as other value-added services like remote management. This paper introduces the concept of the next generation RG and explains the opportunities and benefits that this new device class can bring to equipment manufacturers, service providers and consumers. Different evolution scenarios and architectures for the deployment of this new generation RG will be proposed and discussed as well as requirements in term of functional features such as quality-of-service (QoS) capabilities, media gateway, media gateway controller, NAT, DHCP, firewall, etc. for this next generation RG.