Automating Remote Configuration Mechanisms for Home Devices

Abstract

We examine the automatic configuration of consumer electronics devices delivering remote services to the home network. This environment has two particular aspects; it addresses a mass market, hence any automated approach for streamlined deployment, operation and scalability is of prime importance; it also relies on standardization due to its high dependency on communication protocols and services. Modern standards in this domain, along with the invocation of state of the art technologies around XML, give a totally new look at old management problems. More importantly, these standards directly and primarily address configuration issues in a structured and comprehensive way. This paper promotes the view that these standardizations work, pursued and presented in text form by the relevant standardization bodies. It also suggests standard-based methodologies and tools for remote configuration, management, life-cycle support and testing of devices. This inherently ensures compliance to the standards and enables a streamlined design, thus facilitating the provisioning and management of services offered to subscribers. Our contribution concerns relevant tool suites covering to some variable extend all of these aspects. We emphasize the logical succession of each consecutive step/tool and draw attention to the fact that the resulting interrelationships originate from a common source (i.e. the TR-069 standard) and reflect generic needs of the user/player in question.