ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the evolution of home networks and extended-home scenarios (including horizontal and vertical transport environments) and focuses on the adaptation of the user’s infrastructure to the revolution of digital multimedia services, highlighting the all-Internet protocol (IP) architecture. The exponential growth in the number of multimedia content inputs, and the emergence of the need to merge control and multimedia flows over the same infrastructure, demands a convergent scenario. To obtain the required convergence in digital extended-home communications, all-IP strategies will play a key role. The present chapter will describe a convergent vision focused on the IP network Open System Interconnection (OSI) layer and an infrastructure composed by heterogeneous network segments.
