Collaborative cloud-based management of home networks

Future home networks are expected to become extremely sophisticated, yet only the most technically adept persons are equipped with skills to manage them. In this paper, we provide a novel solution as to how complex smart home networks can be collaboratively managed with the assistance of operators and third party experts. Our solution rests in separating the management and control functionalities of the home access points and routers, away from the actual connectivity, traffic forwarding and routing operations within the home network. By so doing, we present a novel REST-based architecture in which the management of the home network can be hosted in an entirely separate, external cloud-based infrastructure, which models the network within the home as a resource graph.