Control and Understanding: Owning Your Home Network

Mortier, R., Rodden, T., Lodge, T., McAuley, D., Rotsos, C., Moore, A.W., Koliousis, A. and Sventek, J. (2012) Control and Understanding: Owning Your Home Network. In: Comsnets 2012 - 4th International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks, Chancery Pavillion Hotel, Bangalore, India, 3-7 Jan 2012, ISBN 9781467302982 (doi: 10.1109/COMSNETS.2012.6151322)

Abstract

Wireless home networks are increasingly deployed i people’s homes worldwide. Unfortunately, home networks have evolved using protocols designed for backbone and enterprise networks, which are quite different in scale and character to home networks. We believe this evolution is at the heart of widely observed problems experienced by users managing and using their home networks. In this paper we investigate redesign of the home router to exploit the distinct social and physical characteristics of the home. We extract two key requirements from a range of ethnographic studies: users desire greater understanding of and control over their networks’ behaviour. We present our design for a home router that focuses on monitoring and controlling network traffic flows, and so provides a platform for building user interfaces that satisfy these two user requirements.We describe and evaluate our prototype which uses NOX and OpenFlow to provide per-flow control, and a custom DHCP implementation to enable traffic isolation and accurate measurement from the IP layer. It also provides finer-grained per-flow control through interception of wireless association and DNS resolution. We evaluate the impact of these modifications, and thus the applicability of flow-based network management in the home.

• Item Type: Conference Proceedings
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Koliousis, Mr Alexandros and Sventek, Professor Joseph
• Authors: Mortier, R., Rodden, T., Lodge, T., McAuley, D., Rotsos, C., Moore, A.W., Koliousis, A., and Sventek, J.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Computing Science
• Research Group: Embedded, Networked and Distributed Systems
• ISSN: 2155-2487
• ISBN: 9781467302982
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2012 IEEE
• First Published: First published in Proceedings of the 2012 Fourth International Conference on Communication Systems and Networks (COMSNETS 2012)
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced in accordance with the publisher copyright policy

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• Publisher

Project Code	Award No	Project Name	Principal Investigator	Funder's Name	Funder Ref	Lead Dept
47810	1	Homework: Shaping future user centred domestic infrastructures	Joseph Sventek	Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)	EP/F064225/1	SCHOOL OF COMPUTING SCIENCE