HANA 2.0 home networking adds HD video QoS guarantee, discovery and DRM

The three-year old High-Definition Audio-Video Network Alliance (HANA) has made tremendous strides with this innovative home entertainment networking technology. At its suite in the 2008 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), HANA unveiled details of the new 2.0 Design Guideline and demonstrated how its technology enables the real time multi-room HD video network for which the world has been waiting.

2008 Consumer Electronics Show Demo
This year at CES HANA demonstrated its latest developments and capabilities (Figure 1). With a mock up of a four-room house, HANA showed its vision for multimedia in our homes.

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Figure 1: HANA's CES demo shows off its capacities to run over coax, CAT5, plastic optical fiber, and wireless HDMI. Simultaneously view and control multiple real time HD video stream throughout the house. One remote. No new wires.

By simultaneously streaming multiple HD video programs throughout the home, and using a single remote control to access any device in any room, HANA showed off its robust quality of service (QoS) and tremendous flexibility. All four televisions were able to display content from any STBs or PVR in the house, fulfilling its promise of one remote control -- and no new wires!

To illustrate HANA's "no-new-wires" motto, every room was connected using standard splitters and a typical coax wiring structure found in most North American homes. This network operated simultaneously over the coax wiring with standard cable programming without interference. To further illustrate HANA's flexibility, CAT5, optical fiber and wireless connectivity were combined into the demo, with a minimum end-to-end throughput of 400 Mbps. With so many different options available, HANA networks can be easily deployed in various geographies where coax is not readily preinstalled. In separate demos, HANA also revealed the first HANA-to-MoCA bridge solution, and a HANA-enabled RAID hard disk drive array.

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Figure 2: Network Interface Unit

Technology for the demo was supplied by member companies: Cablevision, Samsung, Texas Instruments, Oxford Semiconductor, Pulse~LINK, Firecomms, NewNex, VividLogic and Intellasys.

HANA provided a first glimpse of its 2.0 Design Guidelines (DG2.0) at CES. DG2.0 provides the framework to ensure interoperability of all HANA devices from its member companies. DG2.0 is largely based upon three documents publicly available with the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) standards: CEA-2027-B, CEA-931-C and IEEE-1394.

Next: CEA-2027-B, CEA-931-C and IEEE-1394