ICEbox : Bring ! Point ! Get Configured !

Complex network configuration for digital devices in the home is hard work for most home users, who are not familiar with network technologies. In this paper, we present our effort through a system called ICEbox to reduce the complexity and increase the usability of configuring such devices. The ICEbox, a special node on the home network, allows users to set up devices only with a simple pointing gesture, without worrying about complicated network configuration issues. All that a user needs to do for network setup is to physically bring the device to the ICEbox and point it toward the ICEbox. The ICEbox then takes care of configuring the device, and can also play a role in ongoing monitoring and reconfiguration of the overall network. INTRODUCTION Home broadband adoption is growing and fueling an increase in home networking. However, despite obvious interest on the part of home users, concerns about the complexity of home networking hinder its adoption. Earlier work [2] identified some of the sources of complexity, through ethnographic study of home network early adopters. One of the primary sources of complexity concerns correctly provisioning devices for the home network. This task involves configuring or adapting devices to the particular circumstances and context of a specific home network. In addition to initial setup, another particularly troubling aspect of provisioning is that it is inherently fragile any change to the home network topology, for instance, installation of a second access point or change of Internet Service Provider, has the potential to break the ability of existing devices on the network to communicate with one another, or with the broader Internet. Currently, most network provisioning is done “by hand,” typically by a home user with networking knowledge. This user must understand the topology of the home network, and be able to translate his or her mental knowledge of this topology into settings appropriate for each individual device. Although a number of technologies (DHCP, ZeroConf discovery protocol) can help with certain aspects of provisioning, they clearly do not solve the problem. Fundamentally, the key problem here is that users must be deeply familiar with not only the infrastucture concepts of networking in general, but also the configuration details of his or her specific home network, in order to effectively manage the network and new client devices. Effective configuration and maintenance of the network and the clients on it requires that users be exposed to the technical concepts and terminology of the underlying network. We believe that solutions to IT@Home must not only reduce this burden significantly, but must do so without extensive changes to the existing (and deeply entrenched) networking protocols common in the home. Ideally, a better approach to provisioning would strip away as much manual configuration work as possible, leaving only the minimum required actions that must be undertaken by a user. There will always be some work that can only be done by a user because our systems cannot know without human intervention what devices should be on any given home network. Our goal is to move toward a model in which only this necessary and explicit step of introducing a new device to the network needs to occur, and the technical details of infrastructure configuration are implicitly derived from that. In this paper, we present our efforts at creating such a system, which relies on a simple gestural interface that hides complex network configuration parameters. Our prototype system, called ICEbox (which stands for Installation, Configuration, and Evolution), is a special, privileged node on the home network, tasked with issuing network configurations to new devices and to existing devices when the network topology changes. The provisioning work between the ICEbox and a device is done over a location-limited channel (infrared in our current implementation). The user interface to the ICEbox is quite simple; all that a user needs to do for configuring a device is to bring it to the ICEbox and point it toward the ICEbox. The ICEbox then detects the device and provides it with provisioning information in response to this introduction by the user. This provisioning step can configure not only network parameters suitable for the user’s specific home network, but also higher-level application defaults (such as the home’s default printer, or file shares that exist in the home). Once this initial configuration information is passed to the client, the client can be installed in the home network and communicate with the ICEbox using standard IP-based protocols. These protocols can allow the ICEbox to monitor Internet Home network Home