Enhanced networked environment for personalised provision of AV contect and appliances control information

ESTIA project focuses on the design and development of technologies for efficient personalised management of audiovisual content and white goods functions, locally within the home. This goal will be achieved by specifying the required resources at network infrastructure, communications components (residential gateways and communication interfaces), machine-to-machine, middleware and service levels, with a view to enable seamless audiovisual content manipulation on users terminals in personalised manner.

Behind ESTIA concept, the main research challenge is to remove complexity from user terminals and applications and enhance the role of the residential gateways, currently used for simple interconnection purposes, by enabling designation of local management functions for customised services creation, on the basis of user identity management. This way, users will be allowed to personalise home networking applications (e.g. entertainment and appliances control) according to their needs, by simply composing the service components located at the residential gateway. The project will explore two broad home networking information types, namely the Audiovisual (AV) session management and the white goods control functions.

ESTIA home networking architecture will select and use available networking technologies to develop innovative AV streams manipulation schemes and inter-working with the public networks. Based on this physical infrastructure, the project will define a set of higher-layer interfaces for machine-to-machine and man-to-machine interoperability, leveraging the means of seamless services discovery and media streams manipulation and deployment in personalised manner.