Page 18 - May2016

HGI: CLOSING THE LOOP ON THE GATEWAY TO THE SMART HOME
HGI: Closing the loop on the Gateway to the Smart Home
WHO IS IN THE HGI?
The HGI's core members have been leading broadband service providers
(BSPs), companies that help to deliver IP services to the home, either through
broadband access, services delivery, or a combination. BSPs contribute their
service vision and requirements for digital home enablers to HGI. HGI has welcomed service providers from all corners of the globe, delivering any form of broadband access.
Equally important to HGI were the vendor companies within the digital home ecosystem. They included system companies making home gateways, home networking, and end-user devices; chip companies targeting the digital home; and software companies who create the applications and protocol stacks.
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Luca Giacomello, chairman of the HGI.
Started just 12 years ago, the achievements of the Home Gateway Initiative (HGI) have been prodigious, and have helped enhance the digital home service experience. Luca Giacomello, chairman of the HGI, explains how and why it happened, and the rationale behind the closing of the organisation.
HGI started operating in 2004. It was a time when broadband services were just starting, and services for Internet at home were via simple modems, and for single users only, as there was only one PC in the typical home.
Set up by major broadband service providers and joined by leading vendors of digital home equipment, the HGI understood that there was a need for support for multiple services in the home to enable home networking and all the capabilities that would from flow that. Even in 2004, it was clear that the numbers of home devices would increase, and there would be many personal devices inside the home, hence the need for Wi-Fi bound to Internet connectivity.
There was no clear standard for this kind of product so the newly-formed HGI set itself the task of developing a set of standards that would enable the future digital home ecosystem, with specific focus on smart home services. From 2004 to 2010, the HGI developed specifications for QoS-enabled, triple-play services – voice, video and Internet.
The second wave begins
In 2010, the mission evolved. The mix of HGI members (see box-out) was a key factor in developing the next HGI specification: HGI 2.0. The HGI understood that there was a need to move forward, and add products and devices that could deliver wireless on top of triple play, as well as support troubleshooting, diagnostics, and home network management.
This motivated the development of a new concept for home gateway architectures and work started on new services, starting with the smart home – i.e. IoT services. The mission also converged around smartphones, such as enabling smartphone scenarios on customer premises.
Effectively, it encompassed a delivery framework for smart home services. This architecture includes support for a standard, general purpose software execution environment in the home gateway for third party applications,
API definitions, device abstraction, and interfacing with cloud-based platforms. The HGI’s published Use Cases for Home Energy Management was the first in a range of smart home services that the HGI architecture supports.
In 2014-15, the smartphone documentation and specifications were well-developed but there was a need for consolidation to help operators and HGI players to better understand where to resource new specifications for services to support the growing numbers of IoT devices. So the HGI re-launched itself to enable work on a number of new areas including home gateway security and hybrid access boxes.
HGI in collaboration
The HGI has covered a huge number of topics for home gateways over the last 12 years, including software modularity, basic software architectures, interfaces, smartphones etc. We are now discussing how to pass – or downstream, in the HGI language – those activities to a range of organisations such as the DECT Forum and ULE Alliance.
HGI collaborated with the DECT Forum on the development of HD Voice specifications in 2008- 9. We were also looking at developing HD voice standards and knew that the DECT Forum was working on similar project, one that became the ETSI standard. The collaboration between the two bodies meant that HD voice can now be handled on fixed landlines.
As for the ULE Alliance, HGI's motivation for involvement was the production of documents dealing with basic requirements for managing IoT networks in general. Right now, the market is very fragmented so we decided not to make a choice of architecture or product but to set out general requirements to be used as a checklist. It was very interesting, as we got a lot of feedback. This was useful for the ULE Alliance as it helped them understand how far they were from the operators' requirements for putting their technology in home gateways.
HGI comes to a close
As announced in June 2015, the HGI will bring the organisation to a close by mid-2016. In order to achieve this, HGI will accelerate and finish the important work still underway. Following the end of the organisation, the requirements documents created by HGI will remain available to the industry.
A number of factors have contributed to the decision. The advent of new technologies like programmable networks and virtualisation, the growing importance of gateway software architectures which need to span multiple domains, the fragmentation of the standardisation landscape, as well as the increasing importance of open source projects, have all played a part in our deliberations. We decided the controlled closure of HGI following the accelerated completion of its current work was the most sensible option.
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