Research

Making connections

Issued: Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:39:00 GMT

Over 300 million people worldwide have home broadband connections to the internet. Many households use wired and wireless networking to allow multiple computers to share the broadband connection and to enable media sharing, gaming and other applications. However, current home networking technology remains largely user-unfriendly.

Professor of Communications Systems Joe Sventek and his team are working on a prototype to tackle the issue.

laptop'We wanted to redesign the home network so that it just comes out of the box and works, and empowers homeowners to control their networks in a way they understand.

We're building a wireless router that contains all of the intelligence in our system; it is essentially logging every bit of traffic that's going through the system, but makes it available in a way that's really easy to access.

'If a customer wants to see, for example, how much traffic there was on the web or on iPlayer, we can do that kind of aggregation over periods of time. We can also provide real-time views of the top end-users of the home network, allowing the customer to assert control. So, for instance, if Junior is doing BitTorrent downloads when he's not supposed to, Dad can see that.'

The system includes a touch-screen display with three panels, which the homeowner can use to allocate IP address leases to devices in the home network's range. The middle panel indicates very limited network access based on a renewable, 30-second lease. An icon of a newly connected device remains here until the homeowner decides to drag it either to the right-hand panel, allowing a longer lease for trusted devices, or to the left-hand panel, where it is blocked permanently from accessing the network.

Initial testing in several UK households has resulted in very positive feedback, and Professor Sventek is keen to involve PhD students in the next stages of the system's development.

The team are already investigating options for one or more spinout companies to manufacture the product, third-party troubleshooting and support, and scaling the system for local networks in larger environments, such as schools and small and medium-sized enterprises.

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