Home Service Communities and Authentication

Home networks have been more and more present in today life, delivering miscellaneous services to end users. Then one opportunity consists in deploying services between home networks (service communities). However it requires networking interconnection and efficient authentication mechanisms. According to this context, this paper proposes two network architectures to support home service communities and compares them with the IMS one as a reference solution. One architecture is based on a centralized SIP solution using HTTP digest for authentication whereas the other one is a pure P2P overlay integrating Identity based cryptography. The analysis and comparison of architecture signaling load is undergone through the simulation of a simple photo sharing scenario. Eventually the different solutions propose their own advantages: P2P based solution can be easily deployed for small communities and may be compliant to larger system if research algorithms are improved. SIP central solutions can be relevant for an average number of users and they are the easiest way to deploy new services.