Abstract
The future smart homes will be equipped with a variety of devices that are connected to the internet to provide a multitude of services to consumers. An adequate and reliable broadband connection is a must to support smart home services such as E-Health, home automation, smart energy management and seamless usage of multimedia. To realize such advanced networked applications, especially for households in geographical areas that are unserved or underserved with broadband connectivity, the European Union's 7th Framework Programme funded the BATS integrated project (Broadband Access via integrated Terrestrial and Satellite systems). The main objective of the BATS project is to integrate satellite and terrestrial networks to provide broadband connectivity to households through a home gateway. The envisaged home gateway is intelligent such that it is able to determine in real time the QoS requirements of applications and accordingly make routing decisions to optimize Quality of Experience (QoE) of the end user. In this paper we introduce future smart home applications and devices that would benefit from the BATS concept and discuss the different aspects of designing an intelligent home gateway that is both QoE aware and standard compliant. © 2013 Authors.