Abstract: Home networks are becoming more and more popular. Today's state of the art is that several different technologies, like Wireless LAN (WLAN), Power Line Communication (PLC), or Ethernet, are being used concurrently to connect home devices. If any connection fault happens, the communication stops and new connectivity has to be established. Since the fault detection can last several seconds, it reduces the "Quality of Experience" dramatically, and ongoing transmissions can be disturbed. Therefore, reliability of transmission is a necessary precondition to fulfil customers' expectations. In our approach, we suggest an additional protocol layer, dubbed layer 2.5, which manages any available connectivity and automatically chooses a new connection with the correct properties, for instance HDTV stream. It balances load situations and can also be used to intelligently distribute traffic between nodes. The system has been proven to work in standard LINUX kernel implementation with a speed up to 1 Gb/s and with an extreme low latency. The topology control and signalling components have been implemented in LINUX user space and work on best effort bases. Within this paper, we outline the architectural considerations and show the initial results. The work has been used as the starting point for a new IEEE standardization, i.e., IEEE1905.1. This group started with the OMEGA I-MAC architecture, introduced here. The work described here has received funding from the European Commission's Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007-2013 under grant agreement no. 213311, also referred to as OMEGA.
Key words: Home Networks, Reliable Networks, Heterogeneous Networks, I-MAC, IEEE1905.1, OMEGA.