A management framework for residential broadband environments

The widespread availability of broadband access technologies deeply impacted the residential LAN, reshaping its ecosystems of services and devices and changing the prevalent service delivery and usage paradigms. In this scenario, operators and service providers constantly face the challenge of delivering the best possible value for end-users without compromising revenue, reliability or performance. This balance can only be achieved through a comprehensive management approach, ideally capable of providing an end-to-end coverage of the critical aspects involved in the delivery process and covering the infrastructure, services and devices. In this paper we present the main results of a PhD Dissertation that addressed the challenge of providing service providers with adequate service and device management mechanisms. First, we extended the industry de facto standard for remote management of devices and services on the customer's premises (the CWMP/TR069 framework), in order to increase its scope and flexibility. Afterwards, on top of those extensions, we proposed and investigated an array of innovative approaches for device, service, desktop and security management. Overall, those approaches allow operators to simplify their operations, enabling the improvement of current services as well as the introduction of novel services.