Special Session on Ecological and Smart Home Network

Recent advancement of home appliances and various electronic devices will make the home network much more sophisticated and complicated. In near future, it is necessary to design home networks from smart and elaborated viewpoints so as to make it more useful in daily life.  One of the important viewpoints is the ecology. Ecology is directly related to the environment problems, but it also means to make many relevant things harmonized and integrated so that the important issues can be resolved in a coordinated and smart manner. Ecology also means to give a strong satisfaction for users of the relevant environment, and it is related to smart life of the users.

In order to realize ecological and smart home networks, several viewpoints should be considered in their design. Of course, the first one is energy saving, and it is possible to realize the energy management of home networks like the smart grid systems of the public power supply systems. Even if the energy consumption of home networks is much smaller than the public power supply, it is important to introduce such a consideration.  In order to deal with some high level requirements for home network design, it is necessary to increase the home network maintainability, reliability, integrity and so on in smart way.

Ecological design may request frequent reorganization of network structure, and it is useful to realize the easiness of upgrade and degradation of home networks.

Ecological and smart home network should support the smart life satisfaction, and several such applications include health care, medical care, security protection, efficient management for energy and resource consumption, and it should also support personal happy life through easy communication with community people, high level entertainment, learning and so on.  Ecological and smart home network can bring about the real useful network for everyone, and easy network for everyone.

The goal of this special session is to provide a forum for engineers, architects, and researchers to share knowledge and innovation in ecological and smart home network related services and technologies. We solicit papers covering various topics of interest that include (but are not limited to) the following:

-     Concept of ecological and smart home network
-     Design of ecological and smart home network
-     Relevant technologies for ecological and smart home network
-     Energy control of home network
-     Management of home network and devices
-     Architecture of home network and its gateway
-     Useful case studies of ecological and smart home network
-     Health and medical care through the use of ecological and smart   home network
-     Daily life support by ecological and smart home network
-     Security management for ecological and smart home network 

Submission Instructions
Authors are invited to submit regular technical papers or position papers. The position papers should present novel technologies at an early stage of development or share future vision. All the submissions should describe original, previously unpublished research, not currently under review by another conference or journal. Please submit the paper through EDAS.

The deadlines are as follows:
Paper submission          Aug 31, 2011
Decisions to authors      Sept 15, 2011
Final papers due             October 10, 2011

Organizers
Nobuo Saito (Komazawa University, Japan), ns@komazawa-u.ac.jp
Kazuhiro  Kitagawa (PUCC Consortium, Japan), kaz@sfc.keio.ac.jp
David Menga (EDF, France), david.menga@edf.fr