hBox - Connecting Homes

摘要

Home networks are an increasingly popular platforms for the deployment of ICT solutions for common people. Universal Plug-and-Play has enabled the seamless connection of different home appliances and the services they offer. However, interconnecting home networks, e.g. among friends, in a way that is flexible, easy to deploy and use, and yet well controllable still remains a challenge. This paper tackles this problem and proposes a novel approach for home network interconnection. Our solution consists of a device called hBox which is simply plugged to the residential gateway and controlled with the mobile phone of the home network's administrator. The solution requires no manual configuration and the user authorizes new home networks and shares resources to them using his/her mobile phone. We describe the architecture of our solution and present a prototype implementation of the hBox.