NTT Research and Development 2008 Review of Activities

The spread of home information appliances is driving the installation of LANs in the home. If these LANs can be connected together, e.g., to share content between home information appliances on different LANs or to facilitate teleworking by connecting a home LAN to an office LAN, then this would have the potential to bring about a major change in lifestyles. VPN^*1 technology offers a technique for establishing secure connections between LANs. However, existing VPN technology is mainly oriented towards business applications, and can be quite difficult for customers at home to use since it may, for example, require the user to have specialist knowledge prior to installation, and may always connect to a predetermined destination. On -demand VPN connection technology is implemented with the SIP^*2 protocol which is used in NGNs^*3 and IP networks, and establishes VPN connections simply and securely by specifying the phone number of the remote LAN. Since caller certification and authorization are performed based on the phone number, there is no need for complex presetting of the system. Also, since it uses the SIP protocol, it is possible to perform flexible connection control.

In the fall of 2007, we developed an SIP dial-up gateway using this on-demand VPN connection technology, and we performed verification trials of this gateway on an NGN trial network using a commercial thin client system. We also demonstrated these achievements at the NOTE^*4 exhibition in Otemachi, Tokyo as "Advanced Telecomputing on NGN". By combining the simple and secure on-demand VPN connections offered by this technology with the QoS^*5 guarantee of NGN, we are able to implement stable data communication between LANs with a greater level of reliability.

In the future, we will feed back the results of our verification trials and we will investigate commercializing this technology as an on-demand VPN service on commercial IP networks such as FLET'S Hikari Next.

• *1 VPN: Virtual Private Network
• *2 SIP: Session Initiation Protocol
• *3 NGN: Next Generation Network
• *4 NOTE: NGN Open Trial Exhibition (An exhibition space where people can gain hands-on experience of the latest technology that supports NGNs and services implemented with NGNs.)
• *4 QoS: Quality of Service