Semantic Technologies for User-Centric Home Network Management

Home area network (HAN) management is problematic for ordinary home users. Lack of user expertise, potential complexity of administration tasks, extreme diversity of network devices, price pressures producing devices with minimal feature sets, and highly dynamic requirements of user applications are some of the main challenges in HANs. As networking becomes enabled in many more HAN devices, these problems are set to increase. A viable solution to address these challenges lies in various levels of automation in Home Area Network (HAN), and at a slightly deeper level of self-governance in general, now often termed as autonomic computing. HANs are good candidate for autonomic network management, such as policy-based network management (PBNM), to automate network managing tasks. However, a significant challenge here is the transformation of user requirements to a form that is understandable to the HAN system. Semantic computing enables a system interpreting semantics of instances at different levels of abstraction (e.g. concepts related to users and network) without requiring it to know the interlinks among different system concepts (e.g. how a user is linked to its networked devices and applications). The research work presented in this thesis proposes a framework for the implementation of user-driven, semantic-aware, policy-based HAN management. Our goal is to transform user preferences into network configurations so that we can give control to HAN users to make their networks behave as per their requirements.