The home gateway is becoming a critical focus of activity for firms eager to expand beyond their traditional territories ‘ Intel from PCs and Qualcomm from mobile devices. This will be yet another battleground for the two giants, and of course they will run up against incumbents like Broadcom.
Qualcomm threw its hat in the ring with its Internet Processor last month, unveiling a platform which will target home gateways and, in future, other appliances governing the internet of things. The gateway is becoming more complex and more central to the home media and connectivity experience ‘ going well beyond broadband and Wi-Fi access and coordinating a wide range of connected devices, including those for home automation. That will involve supporting different wireless protocols, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, ZigBee and others, and a growing variety of digital media and third party applications.
Qualcomm is arguing its case to power these gateways with its usual starting point ‘ its low power expertise. The firm is applying the skills and technologies it created for ultra-low power handsets to larger kit, whether small cell base stations or set-top boxes or, most recently, the gateway. Its latest brace of chips are the first it has designed for this segment. They are based on dual-core Krait processors at 1.4GHz (like the Snapdragon smartphone platform) but couple these with a dual-core network accelerator engine, which offloads traffic and can reach the packet processing levels of specialized gateway silicon. This can process streams of up to 5Gbps and is tightly integrated ‘ another hallmark Qualcomm skill ‘ with a range of radios including Wi-Fi, cellular and Bluetooth.
Amir Faintuch, president of Qualcomm Atheros, said the amount of data being processed in the home was starting to require the kind of technology originally created for the enterprise, but combined with the low power consumption of a mobile gadget. He says the silicon will appear in commercial devices next year.
The gateway will not only support a widening range of protocols and media, but also a large number of apps, whether embedded or acquired from app stores. The OSGi (Open Services Gateway initiative) is emerging as a key player as a foundation for several emerging platforms relating to the smart home, embedded devices and the internet of things (IoT).
It is providing the framework platforms that will enable coexistence and interoperability between software components running in the home gateway and also embedded in low power devices. OSGi underpins the HGI (Home Gateway Initiative) document called Requirements for Software Modularity in the Home Gateway, which specifically addresses operators’ requirements for remote deployment and execution of modular software. It ensures that such third party components run in a dedicated virtual execution environment in order to avoid conflicts and interference with the software deployed and controlled by the operator, for Internet access and pay TV services.
One important platform emerging around OSGi is the Home Automation Bus (openHAB) project, which is aiming for universal integration of applications in home automation. It is written purely in Java, because of the language’s ubiquity for web applications and relative independence from the underlying hardware. OpenHAB is designed to enable coexistence between different protocols that will be used by software embedded in low power devices within the home, such as Zigbee and Z-Wave.
OpenHAB looks like becoming an important technology for integrating home automation components and therefore will loom increasingly on the radar for broadband service providers. Launched mid 2012 it got off to a slow start and generated little interest outside the immediate automation community, largely because it only addressed the KNX protocol designed for communication within intelligent buildings, which in turn only supported wired standards such as twisted pair, powerline and Ethernet.
As such it was only really of use for new buildings, but KNX now supports wireless communications as well, while the latest version of OpenHAB embraces other automation standards and has attracted particular interest in Germany. There it is integrated with a radio based platform operating at 868 MHz called Homematic, capable of communicating with a wide range of sensors and actuators for automated operation of blinds, heating systems, locks and other components. This is leading towards integrated home automation services, enabling for example automatic home shutdown when leaving the house, operating locks, heating and environmental control systems all at the click of a key.
OSGi lies at the heart of OpenHAB and plays the key role as a broker reducing software complexity by enabling Java modules to slot together without having to deal with underlying protocols and at the same time operate across systems of all sizes, from the smallest Internet connected embedded components to large scale distributed systems. OSGI is still work in progress with further development needed, for example to ensure that transactions run consistently across all combinations of distributed systems that are compliant with the standard. But meanwhile it is being deployed by key vendors in the gateway arena with commitments to stay compatible with OSGi as it continues to evolve. For example the OSGI platform has been incorporated by two home gateway SoC (System on Chip) makers Lentil and STMicro. The latter’s software is pre-integrated in its set top box SoCs, which are now being positioned as early contenders for smart home boxes adding home energy management, automation and security systems in addition to their usual role distributing multimedia content.
OSGi is being adopted by Cisco among others for deployment of third party apps on its platform. It underlies its Linux/Java based Application Extension Platform (AXP) for which Cisco is encouraging developers to adopt OSGi as the most suitable, component-oriented platform for Java-based software development.
OSGi may not become as widely known as say DLNA as a standard platform, partly because it will often be buried within other frameworks, such as the Eclipse 3.0 Java based Integrated Development Environment. But as Cisco noted, the Eclipse framework for supporting Java plug-ins to enable customization and third party app deployment relies on OSGi. As such OSGi is evolving to become another ‘universal middleware’, in this case to support the packaging, version control, deployment, publication and discovery of software in the cloud from a gateway or set top. It is therefore central to Cisco’s vision of the future thin, but smart and flexible set top.