Ambient telephony: scenarios and research challenges

Telecommunications at home is changing rapidly. Many people have moved from the traditional PSTN phone to the mobile phone. Now for increasingly many people Voice-over-IP telephony on a PC platform is becoming the primary technology for voice communications. In this tutorial paper we give an overview of some of the current trends and try to characterize the next generation of home telephony, in particular, the concept of ambient telephony. We give an overview of the research challenges in the development of ambient telephone systems and introduce some potential solutions and scenarios.