Residential-Gateways: Embedded internet and more for smart buildings

Fraunhofer-IMS has a very good technological potential for the development and testing of product-orientated hardware-software-system solutions for the arising markets of smart houses and the related added-value-services. A key competence in this field is a system integration technology for the diverse subsystems and the related data communication standards, networks and interfaces in future buildings. A complete and flexible smart house innovation center (inHaus) with a living and working laboratory house is now available near our institute, especially for testing and demonstration in the real application environment. We have realized already a number of demonstrator, prototype and product solutions in this field, one example for this is the described ISDN-EIB residential gateway. In the near future we will extend our building block collection by gateways also for the broadband segment as an addition to the shown narrow-band technology for control purposes. A first example will be a gateway between DSL external networks and the IEEE-1394 firewire/i-link internal network standard for Audio-Video-Applications. One application for such gateways can be video-on-demand or private video conferencing.