Home Networking

by Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.
Summer/Fall 2002

Did you ever stop at the local video store on the drive home from work, find a DVD you wanted to see, but couldn't remember if you already owned it? Imagine pulling out your WAP-based cell phone and immediately checking with your home's 300-disc DVD carousel to check your current inventory.

Sound incredible? Well, imagine also getting from that same cell phone, a list of suggested titles, and based on where you were that day, the kind of day that you were likely to have.

The American Home, 15 Minutes into the Future
At the IBM Pervasive Computing Laboratory in Austin, Texas, they're designing the technology to bring just such a scenario to life. But what does pervasive computing mean? Bill Bodin, the director of the lab, says that basically, it's all about "getting people the data that they need and the connectivity that they need to get the data to any device, over any server architecture, and doing so in real time with guaranteed delivery of transactions." That is why IBM built a model home inside one-half of this laboratory.

Inside the home you find the same types of rooms found in a typical residence: a living room, kitchen and garage for example. But, to paraphrase Max Headroom, it's a home that's at least 15 minutes into the future. Bodin says, "You have network connectivity of things that were historically more traditional devices, such as home theater receivers or amplifiers or big-screen televisions."

Besides transmitting data that turns your cell phone into what he calls a "virtual concierge," you can download favorite TV shows, and categorize channels into tabs and folders, with simple voice commands. Those TV shows can move with you, from a big-screen TV in the living room to the garage. "You can simply take your PDA out to your wirelessly enabled garage, and all of a sudden, you're streaming the content from your cable box directly out there. And you have real-time voice control over what channel you're watching." So you don't have to miss a moment of the game or soap opera while you put in that next load of laundry.

Gateway to the Home
To accomplish this integration of home automation technologies, IBM has focused quite a bit of its research on a unifying device: the home gateway.

Numerous manufacturers have recently begun to provide residential gateways. This device takes the data pipe (or pipes) coming into the home, such as the line from a cable TV company, and separates out the connections for Internet, telephone and television. It then distributes those signals among the various devices in the home.

Bodin says that IBM's Austin lab is testing a much smarter gateway than is currently being manufactured a device capable of storing programs and communicating not only with the data pipes in the home, but the power lines as well. For example, My Luu, the Pervasive Computing Lab's public relations manager, says that IBM has "an engagement with Carrier that would allow consumers to turn on and off their air conditioning unit remotely and also set the temperatures on [it] via their cell phones."

Like many of the devices IBM designs and tests, this one may be available to consumers in the next year or two.

Interacting with the Weather - and Weather.com
The gateway, with its Internet interface, could change how the home interacts with the weather. IBM's lab is testing the ability to get even more control and information to and from common household items, such as lighting and thermostat settings. If your summertime "turn on the lights" setting is 9 p.m., but a storm is brewing, www.weather.com can tell your gateway, which in turn will tell the lights in your house to turn on earlier.

Additionally, rather than using a PC to control home automation devices, which is common today in the relatively few U.S. homes that have any automation, IBM sees the television as a user-friendly place to interact with the home's automated systems. In one scenario that Bodin describes, "Simply check a box on your television screen that's associated with your irrigation system, and all of a sudden now, your residential gateway is starting to listen to what weather.com is telling it, and is starting to defer water cycles, because it knows that the Doppler weather pattern is favorable for rain that night. So there are lots of different things that are going to save time and money and increase safety for the consumer."

Inside Tomorrow's Smart Car
IBM has initiated deals with automobile manufacturers such as Peugeot PSA and Daimler-Chrysler. The IBM lab in Austin is testing a Chrysler Concorde with an e-mail browser, a live news browser and a total diagnostic system. Bodin says it "can assess your vehicle's health and well-being constantly, and even send that data onto a back-end repository of servers on behalf of the automotive companies." These systems are tested to run on multiple wireless protocols, including Bluetooth and the popular 802.11b wireless LAN standard.

Bodin says that IBM is also testing a system that allows a car to take in not only fuel at the local gas station, but information as well. "Your car will interact wirelessly with your gas pump in the future, and be able to either offer you deals, or in essence, take that gas pump and interact with it as if it was an Internet gateway, so you'll have high-bandwidth broadband right into the car for delivering real-time music, real-time news, weather, stock quotes, whatever it is you're interested in, as you fill up."

This Year's Home of the Future
For decades, consumers have been tempted by the promise of the home of the future, but while isolated pockets of technology have caught on (the PC, the home theater, the microwave), most homeowners have been reluctant to own unified high-tech homes. Bodin says, "The reason for the reluctance, I think, is that before, you had to be a network administrator to pull it off. And that's not what we're about here. We're about very well designed products that don't require you to be a database analyst or an expert in TCP/IP."

Bodin sees the intelligent gateway as making all the difference in the world. He says that current gateway designs aren't necessarily that intelligent, because they don't really host applications and they can't do dynamic discoveries of any new technologies in the home. All of this makes it a very, very difficult process for a typical person. Consumers appreciate and thrive on ease of use, convenience and reliability.

If IBM's research is successful, look for high-tech to become much more user-friendly for the average homeowner. This means that your home may be 15 minutes into the future, much sooner than you think!