Specification and Unattended Deployment of Home Networks at the Edge of the Network

Consumer devices continue to expand their capabilities by connecting to digital services and other devices to form information-sharing ecosystems. This is complex and requires meeting connection requirements and minimal processing capabilities to ensure communication. The emergence of new services, and the evolution of current technologies, constantly redefine the rules of the game by opening up new possibilities and increasing competition among service providers. Paradigms such as edge computing, softwarization of physical devices, self-configuration mechanisms, definition of software as a code and interoperability between devices, define design principles to be taken into account in future service infrastructures. This work analyzes these principles and presents a programmable architecture in which services and virtual devices are instantiated in any computing infrastructure, as cloud or edge computing, upon request according to the needs specified by service providers or users. Considering that the target computing infrastructures are heterogeneous, the solution defines network elements and provides network templates to ensure it can be deployed on different infrastructures irrespectively of the vendor. A prototype has been developed and tested on a virtualized cloud-based home network relying on open source solutions.