An Implementation of the Broadband Home Gateway supporting Multi-Channel IPTV Service

Home gateway (HG), called residential gateway (RG) in other words, is a device that interconnects various home electronic devices to one another as well as connects these private home network devices to exterior public network. There are various types of digital home services in IP (Internet protocol)-based home network system; data service, entertainment service, security service, home automation service and so on. Multimedia related service, especially IPTV (Internet protocol television) service, is the attractive one to customer in these home network services. In this paper, we show the implementation of the broadband home gateway supporting multi-channel IPTV service. The proposed and implemented home gateway has an architecture that can provide multi-channel, more than three channels, HD (high definition) class IPTV service with 20 Mbps (megabits per second) bandwidth for each channel. For the improved IPTV service using IP multicast, the proposed HG uses Internet group multicast protocol (IGMP) proxy and IGMP snooping protocol. The proposed HG consists of two main components, system processor for NAT (network address translation) processing and system software functions and an L2 (layer 2) Ethernet switch to interface access network and network distribution in intra-home network. The multicast packets for the multi channel IPTV service go from ingress port for access network interface to egress ports for home network directly based on L2 multicast MAC (medium access control) table in L2 Ethernet switch without via the system processor of the HG. This paper specifies in detail the system structure and implementation of hardware, firmware and software for the proposed HG