Residential Gateway (RG)

A residential gateway (RG) provides “… Internet access throughout the home and remote management of common household appliances such as lights, security systems, utility meters, air conditioners, and entertainment systems.”^†

Open Services Gateway Initiative (OSGi™) Alliance http://www.osgi.org/ Links to an external site. is attempting to define a standard framework and API for network delivery of managed services to local networks and devices.

An alternative to using a residential gateway to attach analog phones are devices such as the Cisco Analog Telephone Adaptor (ATA) 186 [Cisco 186].

In VOCAL: “SIP Residential Gateway is an IP Telephony gateway based on SIP which allows a SIP user agent to make/receive SIP call to/from the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN).”^‡

^†from http://www.national.com/appinfo/solutions/0,2062,974,00.html - “National Semiconductor signed a definitive agreement in August 2003 to sell its Information Appliance (IA) business unit, consisting primarily of the Geode™ family of microprocessor products, to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)”

^‡http://www.vovida.org/fom-serve/cache/761.html

Slide Notes

Open Services Gateway Iniative (OSGi), http://www.osgi.org Links to an external site.

Cisco Analog Telephone Adaptor (ATA) 186 http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/cc/pd/as/180/186/ Links to an external site.

Transcript

[slide525] They had residential gateways. And there's an activity called the Open Services Gateway Initiative, OSGI, that's been working for decades trying to produce residential gateways. What's a residential gateway? It's basically a box that would sit in your home. It would be the gateway for all of your services, whether it's meter reading, remote control of your home, home security, voice over IP, all of these sorts of things. The problem is it needs to do that for all the different services you have. And somehow you need to trust it, because it's seeing lots of sensitive data. It knows when you're home. It knows who the people in the home are at the given time. It knows how much electricity you're using, how many times the refrigerator door was opened, or when the dishwasher was run, et cetera. And it turns out to be quite a job. People have looked at basically running these services in virtual machines inside the residential gateway. And if you look a year ago, there's a thesis about this.