hBox - Connecting Homes

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.