Consumer-managed federated homes

Abstract

There are emerging opportunities for distributed, composite services, based on the combination of smart homes, networked consumer devices, third-party services, and social, geographical or commercial collaborations. However, current home automation technology tends to focus on the single-home solution, rather than enabling home users to securely share and easily manage the resources and services of their home area network. This article describes a new federated home architecture that addresses these needs, reports on prototyping to date, and provides an overview of several important technologies for the next generation of federated homes. Our vision is to support a future of user-centric device and service sharing from home to home across the Internet, in a way that does not rely on centralized authority but supports a web of secure, peer-wise trusted relationships between consumers.