Cloud assisted home networks
Hassan Habibi Gharakheili, Vijay Sivaraman · 2017
Managed services for the home have traditionally been shunned by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) as having high overheads and low margins. In this paper we argue that the maturing ecosystem around Software Defined Networking (SDN) changes the equation, allowing ISPs to provide cloud-based and self-managed value-add services to consumers at low cost and large scale. We first demonstrate use-cases in which SDN gives greater visibility into home network activity, enabling self-customization of Internet experience by the household, while reducing support costs for the ISP. We then outline a cloud-assisted architecture that realizes these capabilities, and detail our implementation that leverages commodity hardware and open-source software. Finally, we deploy our fully-functional system in selected households in Australia and Iran, and analyze activity data collected over a month to present insights on number and composition of connected devices, video-viewing patterns, and content preferences based on web-sites visited.