With the fast growth of smart appliances and smart devices at home, the concept of smart home has come a long way in recent years. As a result, home networking is transforming from the connection of one or at most a few user computers using the simplest local area network to one of the most heterogeneous networks supporting intelligent applications. For example, in recent years, many home appliances and devices are equipped with networking capabilities that enable remote management, such as power plugs that can be remotely turned on and off, thermostats that can be remotely adjusted, door locks that allow keyless entry, and surveillance systems for remote monitoring. These and other changes, such as wearable devices that may frequently move in and out of the home, are likely to revolutionize how we live. This emerging smart home environment, however, poses serious challenges to conventional TCP/IP based technologies because smart home networking has fundamentally different characteristics that are not seen from conventional IP networks including, for example, the absence of an operator, high degrees of device heterogeneity, and a need for strong security, privacy, minimal configuration, and self-management. Until recently advances in smart home networking and home Internet of Things have been largely stove-pipe solutions with little focus on interoperability across products or integration in design.
The Named Data Networking architecture (NDN), with its data-centric approach, includes benefits such as address independence, built-in security, and in-network storage and shows great potential to address the unique challenges of home networking. This project aims to formulate important research questions about smart home networking, explore NDN's unique advantages in addressing the challenges, and identify directions for potential solutions. The plan to achieve these goals is by experimenting with two prototype application systems -- home lighting control and home video surveillance -- trying out different designs, and eventually generalizing what is learned to other applications. Using the two prototype systems, the project will explore approaches for device bootstrapping, device actuation, data publishing and consuming, network management, and a gateway to the public Internet. The results will be used to feedback into the NDN architectural design as well. If successful, this effort could pave the way towards exciting, novel solutions to smart home networking and application deployment.
This project develops viable, long-term solutions to an emerging network environment that has been recognized by many industry experts. Since there is no mature IP-based solution on the market yet, an NDN-based solution could have significant impact. If successful this research might also provide a path for NDN deployment. The deployment of home networks does not require coordination among external networks, and because individuals can deploy NDN (and enjoy its benefits) in their homes even if their neighbors do not, individuals can potentially provide a realistic, grassroots deployment scenario for NDN rollout.
