A configuration service for home networks

As the complexity and size of home networks increases, so does the need for better management support for nonexpert home users. In this paper we describe an extensible policy-based configuration service that allows the home networking infrastructure to be viewed, verified and reconfigured at a higher-level of abstraction. The aim is to ensure that configuration changes in network infrastructure do not result in erroneous setups and to allow intuitive user-centric tools to operate at a higher-level of abstraction. Our implementation compiles configuration tasks to host/device level commands and supports deployment to multiple heterogeneous devices. We demonstrate and evaluate our approach using access control and bandwidth sharing as two examples of home management tasks.