Control and understanding: Owning your home network

Abstract

Abstract-Wireless home networks are increasingly deployed in 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.

A Survey of Software-Defined Networking: Past, Present, and Future of Programmable Networks

“…In contrast, Mortier et al [77] believe that users desire greater understanding and control over their networks' behavior; rather than following traditional policies, a home network may be better managed by their users who better understand the dynamics and needs of their environment. Towards this goal, they created a prototype network in which SDN is used to provide users a view into how their network is being utilized while offering a single point of control.…”

Mobility management in IEEE 802.11 WLAN using SDN/NFV technologies

“…Recently, the OpenFlow protocol has been considered in the wireless access network to provide the fine-grained packet control, and SDN makes the separation of underlying physical infrastructure and the network services [15][16][17][18][19]. The OpenRoads [15] was the first project in the SDN-based WLAN environment that enables wireless network slicing using the FlowVisor to assign different SSIDs to the MT.…”

“…The OpenRoads introduced the OpenFlow-based testbed to control mobility between the WiFi and the WiMax base stations. Mortier et al [16] proposed a prototype using the OpenFlow protocol to enable flow-based scheme with the fine-grained packet control in home networks. CloudMAC [17] is a distributed architecture that enables transferring the processing of MAC layer functions on the central servers to minimize the IEEE 802.11 AP pressure, and the AP is responsible only for the MAC frames forwarding among the virtual APs using the OpenFlow.…”

Flexible traffic management in broadband access networks using Software Defined Networking

“…Logged data is stored near the access node and can be shared by the service provider among users for better troubleshooting. In another study Mortier et al [23] present an OpenFlow-based design for a home router that focuses on monitoring and controlling network traffic flows. The proposed idea addresses the desire of home users to better understand and control their network behavior.…”