Partner und Internationale Organisationen
(Englisch)
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Solinet (D), CSEM SA (CH), Lucent Tech. (NL),
Ellemedia (EL), G.E. Capital (EL), ARM (UK), NTUA (EL)
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Abstract
(Englisch)
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The general objective of the Infogate project was to design and implement a test bed of an information gateway for
residential users that has the capability to set up via electronic switching nearly arbitrary connections between public access
networks (such as ISDN, aDSL, cable modem) and indoor networks (such as ethernet, wireless LAN, power-line, analog
telephone). This near market product prototype permits to explore hardware and software issues and allows to use the
acquired knowledge for a more efficient product design phase. The hardware and software of the gateway was designed in a
modular way, such that interfaces for indoor or access network technologies can be added or removed at will. On the control
plane, a protocol translation is done in a central entity, enabling to specify a single common generic protocol that all cards
have to speak and understand. The purpose of this generic protocol is mainly to deal with plug-and-play and connection
control issues. On the transport plane, an ATM bus is used to interconnect the different network interface cards.
The hardware and software modules that CSEM has designed and produced implements an indoor wireless LAN interface to
the gateway, using the IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN technology at 11 Mbps. The hardware design is centered around the
micro-controller MPC860SAR from Motorola. On the software side, VxWorks as well as embedded Linux have been used,
for which drivers have been written for the ATM and wireless LAN interfaces. The hardware board designed by CSEM has
itself a number of networking interfaces: serial port, ATM, Ethernet and a PCMCIA interface, which hosts a Lucent Wavelan
802.11 PC card. This approach is particularly versatile, since any future wireless PC cards (e.g. Bluetooth or Hiperlan2)
can be used instead of the 802.11 PC card with only software driver modifications. The developed board can hence be used
in standalone as a test and prototyping platform for networking applications. A number of features offered by the Linux
kernel and applications have been explored to offer functions such as firewalling, network address translation, DHCP server
and Web server with cgi-bin interface for remote configuration of the gateway. In addition to the hardware, we have
contributed to the definition of the overall architecture and protocols that allow easy plug and play as well as
interoperability. The complete gateway has been successfully demonstrated.
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