Inter-MAC — From vision to demonstration: Enabling heterogeneous meshed home area networks

Regarding the increased capacity of broadband access networks and the huge variety of applications and offered services a single networking technology cannot reliably fulfill all transmission tasks arising in home area networks. For this, we develop the Inter-MAC integrating different media in home area networks, i.e. wireline and wireless. It allows for an adaptive transmission across available networking technologies and seamless inter-technology switching hidden from the network layer. In this paper, we describe the evolution of the Inter-MAC from a vision to the demonstration. We present our reference implementation based on off-the-shelf and experimental equipment and describe its deployment in a representative home network scenario. Through performance evaluation, we demonstrate the feasibility of the Inter-MAC concept. Furthermore, a multi-hop transmission of a single HDTV stream across a heterogeneous meshed home area network is demonstrated.