A MANAGEMENT FRAMEWORK FOR RESIDENTIAL BROADBAND ENVIRONMENTS

Abstract

The expansion of high-speed broadband access networks, with an increasing growth in the number of connected households has brought a new set of concerns related to aspects such as management, services and security, with potential consequences for communication operators, clients and third-parties. The considerable number of residential customers served by broadband networks that lack the necessary technical knowledge to manage their equipment and infrastructure, in a self-sufficient manner, together with the high bandwidth available for each permanent connection, contribute to a scenario that conventional centralized operator security and management models are unable to deal with. This thesis addresses these issues in the perspective of the operator management infrastructure, by proposing a management framework for devices and services based on a different operation paradigm in which the operator is able to extend its influence to the customer premises LAN, instead of remaining confined to its own infrastructure. This has the benefit of relieving the users from the LAN configuration and management burden, while allowing operators to deliver a better service, by easing diagnostics and configuration procedures. In this perspective, several related aspects will be addressed in the form of application scenarios, always in an integrated perspective orthogonal to the proposed management framework, namely: • Device management: in order to integrate the heterogeneous device and management standards ecosystem of the residential network in the scope of the operator management infrastructure. By bridging both worlds, operators are able to extend their reach into the customers’ premises networks, managing all sorts of devices and services while relieving users from such burden and improving service quality. • Exploration of new service paradigms: another aspect which is addressed in the scope of this thesis has to do with researching and evaluating new service paradigms for leveraging the benefits of broadband environments. Those value-added proposals are conceived as complementary to the existing operators’ connectivity and service portfolio, being proposed in the form of managed services. • New security models: the specific nature of broadband network environments, together with its increasing household penetration ratio has contributed to create and/or increase a number of security issues which are growing to the point of becoming a serious threat, with repercussions at several levels, from service degradation to compromising personal information. In this perspective, a distributed security model based on the concept of shared security is proposed, bringing together operators and users in an effort to detect and fight the potential menaces which threaten modern broadband environments. Not only these topics are of particular concern in the scope of broadband access networks, but they are also becoming increasingly relevant with the inclusion of other factors such as the introduction of integrated broadband services over IP (such as triple-play) and the expansion of the customer base. As such, his thesis proposes to contribute to this discussion by proposing innovative models for security, services and management in the context of broadband access networks.