Remote Discovery and Management of End-User Devices in Heterogeneous Private Networks

End-to-end broadband service delivery requires remote management of devices in the home network, beyond the home gateway (HG). The service provider can only put limited requirements to these of-the-shelf devices, and therefore has to make intelligent use of their given control and management protocols. The authors propose architectures for the unique remote discovery and management of such devices in a highly heterogeneous home network. We suggest to have the HG discovering these devices and to proxy management and control actions to the provider's remote servers. This approach has been recently adopted by the Home Gateway Initiative. A proof-of- concept is described for the remote management of UPnP devices in the home with a simple TR-069/UPnP proxy on the HG, but the architecture is basically generic for any combination of Web-services like protocols.