One of the more interesting sessions at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Quebec City in July 2011 was the first meeting of the recently established Homenet Working Group [1]. What is so interesting about networking the home? Well, if you regard challenges as "interesting," then just about everything is interesting when you look at networking in the home!

It has been a very long time since the state of the art in home Internet involved plugging the serial port of the PC into the dialup modem. The Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) modem, even when combined with some form of Wi-Fi base station, is looking distinctly passé these days. Today, the home network is seeing the intersection of a whole set of interests, including phone service, television service, home security services, energy management, utility service metering, other forms of home device monitoring, and, of course, connecting laptops and mobile devices to the net. The home network is not just a wired Local-Area Network (LAN), Wi-Fi home networks are commonplace, and there are also various Bluetooth devices. Maybe sometime soon it will be common for the home network to host some form of Third-Generation (3G) femtocell mobile cell phone repeater as well. But these days even that level of network complexity is not enough. Increasingly, the home office is part of the work office, and if numerous residents are at home, then the home network may be an endpoint for several corporate and institutional Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) [2].