High-Speed WAN to Wireless LAN Gateway

摘要

A gateway interconnecting a high speed Wide Area Network (WAN) and a lower speed Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is provided. The high speed WAN is preferably connected to the gateway via a Fiber-to-the Home (FTTH) connection and associated FTTH modem. In general, the gateway includes an adaptable cross-layer offload engine operating to manage bandwidth between the high speed WAN and the lower speed WLAN. As data enters the gateway from the WAN at the high speed data rate of the WAN, the offload engine stores the data in a non-secure data cache. A rule check engine performs a stateless or stateful inspection of the data in the non-secure data cache. Thereafter, the data is moved from the non-secure data cache to a secure data cache and thereafter transmitted to an appropriate user device in the WLAN at the lower data rate of the WLAN.

主权项

1. A residential gateway within a customer premises interconnecting a Wide Area Network (WAN) external to the customer premises to a lower speed Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) within the customer premises, the residential gateway comprising:
an adaptable cross-layer offload engine; a data cache associated with the offload engine; a network interface communicatively coupling the offload engine to the WAN and providing a first data rate; and a wireless interface associated with the offload engine and adapted to communicate with a plurality of user devices within the WLAN, the interface providing a second data rate that is less than the first data rate of the network interface; wherein the offload engine is adapted to:
receive incoming data from the WAN via the network interface at the first data rate;store the incoming data in the data cache; andtransmit the incoming data from the data cache to a corresponding one of the plurality of user devices in the WLAN via the wireless interface at the second data rate; further wherein the gateway further comprises: a rule check engine adapted to inspect the incoming data from the WAN based upon at least one rule prior to transmitting the incoming data to the corresponding one of the plurality of user devices in the WLAN, the at least one rule comprises at least one Digital Rights Management (DRM) rule and the rule check engine operates to identify content comprising at least a portion of a media file to be processed by a DRM function and initiate the DRM function for the identified content; and a file format conversion function adapted to convert the identified content that is in a first viewable or playable file format to converted content in a second viewable or playable file format having lesser bandwidth requirements than the first file format; wherein the DRM function is initiated by the rule check engine based on the at least one DRM rule, the DRM function being adapted to:
encrypt the converted content independent of any encryption of the incoming data transmitted over the WLAN, such that encrypted content is transmitted to the corresponding one of the plurality of user devices within the WLAN preventing unauthorized viewing or playing of the converted content via the corresponding one of the plurality of user devices, andprovide license keys for decrypting the encrypted content to desired ones of the plurality of user devices having permission to view or play the converted content.