A home network is one of the next-generation information and communication technology (ICT)-centered applications, and this paper discusses the current state of relating technologies and various aspects necessary for better home network realization. It is necessary to discuss the technologies for a good home network, but it is also important to consider this from the different aspects other than technologies. Cost, power consumption, maintainability, and relevant data volume are such view points, and they support better ecological home network. This paper first discusses the technology components which support realization of a home network. They are network technologies, varieties of devices, software-based systems and standards, and home gateway, the key component of a better home network. Then, the author shows several considerations from the ecological viewpoints such as cost saving, energy saving, human load saving, and data volume saving. The real technology and business for a home network is still in an evolving stage, and it is necessary to discuss the implementation issues for a home network. Home gateway is an important component for managing a home network, and the author proposes a home gateway architecture suitable for better implementation of a home network as a whole.

The articles in this special issue focus on the development and applications supported by smart home technologies.

We have been developing and standardizing middleware technologies for home network control from a mobile phone in Peer-to-peer Universal Computing Consortium (PUCC), which is a consortium towards de facto standardization. We discussed issues for unified home network control from a mobile phone. We describe the peer-to-peer/overlay networking technologies developed by PUCC, to resolve those issues. We describe recent PUCC activities, which include the development of PUCC specifications Release 1, development of prototypes implementing PUCC protocols, demonstrations of such prototypes at international leading tradeshows such as CES and CeBIT, and activities towards international standardization. PUCC started a new project for integrated home network control and management in 2009, based on those activities.

P2P technology is very important to construct low cost efficient network, and it is used to realize better home network to connect various kinds of digital equipments and devices for daily use. The authors introduced the standard development organization called PUCC to support such better P2P networks and its services, and give brief description about its current activities as well as the future activity plans..

The authors compare dataflow computing models, languages, and dataflow computing machines for numerical and nonnumerical computations. The high-level-language-graph transformations that must be performed to achieve high performance for numerical and nonnumerical programs executed in a dataflow computing environment are described for Lisp, using the DCBL transformations. Some general problems of dataflow computing machines are discussed. Performance evaluation measurements obtained by executing benchmark programs in the ETL nonnumerical dataflow computing environment, the EM-3, are presented.>