Multimedia collaboration architecture for the digital home

Home Server plays an important role to manage all home network devices and multimedia content services in the digital home. Multimedia collaboration over wireless devices is inhibited by several factors and requires and advanced software architecture to support bandwidth reservation, QoS, reliability, availability and security. The decision based on a single input and a single security agent to serve all the needs of the home users is to be enhanced to facilitate multi-modal inputs with multiple integrated User Agents working to-ether to facilitate the new generation of dynamic wireless users at home. Cumulated with the technology trend of decreasing display sizes and ever-increasing array of features available to the user, it is very difficult to display all the features on the shrinking displays. Display has to be adaptive and context sensitive to adapt to the dynamic needs of the user. In this paper, we present our recent efforts for extending the functionalities of Home Server in order to support wireless multimedia collaboration and multi-modal context-sensitive analysis. We present a enhanced Home Server architecture that facilitates the existing model to be applied to incotporate wireless set-vices and wireless sensor networks for digital home automation. The plethora of possible inputs to the digital home infrastructure and the necessity for dynamic adaptive context-sensitive output extends the new design architecture to home servers and home networking devices.